{"id":20677,"date":"2009-12-29T16:00:35","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T21:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=20677"},"modified":"2009-12-29T23:40:32","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T04:40:32","slug":"with-logic-defying-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/with-logic-defying-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"With logic defying intelligence…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader:<\/p>\n

Holy Mercury Station Retrograde, Batman.<\/p>\n

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What every pundit from here in San Francisco to The New York Times<\/em> could try to say about\u00a0Flight 253, also known in these parts as the Underwear Bomber event, none could be clearer than Rachel Maddow, with the help of NBC’s foreign correspondent Richard Engel on her primetime MSNBC show “The Rachel Maddow Report.”<\/p>\n

In a little under 12 minutes, they set the record straight, explaining many ways in which our “war on terror” is totally misguided. It’s worth the watch; if this is your first experience of Ms. Maddow (who broadcasts nightly on MSNBC), welcome to one of the freshest, most alive and intelligent voices currently on television. (She recently gave Eric her exact chart data, and we will be doing her astrology close to her birthday, which is April 1.)<\/p>\n

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It was a foregone conclusion on the progressive blogs that once the Northwest Airline event happened, reaction from the Republicans would come like the second shoe dropping.\u00a0The little noise parade included the timeworn elements of racial profiling, talk of detainment camps and Islamophobia, all of which flourished over the Christmas holiday, the season of Christian peace, joy and harmony. Al-Qaeda could not ask for better irony, but they didn’t get much else; Flight 253 landed on its wheels.<\/p>\n

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Karl Rove, George Bush’s longtime political adviser, was “deeply troubled”<\/strong><\/a> by Obama’s response, and Mary Matalin, former adviser to Vice President Cheney, was shocked, SHOCKED that the Bush-Cheney administration had inherited undealt with terror threats against Americans.<\/p>\n

Radio host Mike Gallagher exclaimed: “There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.”<\/p>\n

In Congress, aside from Sen. Lieberman’s response, which Maddow tears apart in her spot, we have manufactured outrage from Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the same senator responsible for the months-long delay of the appointment of Pres. Obama’s nominee Erroll Southers to the post of director of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), because he feels TSA workers should not unionize.<\/a> <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It feels a lot like the usual cavalcade of idiots.\u00a0What’s missing is that we can’t get past the whole fear-safety-victim conundrum which characterized the Bush administration. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

We’re facing the mirror of our own fears coming back to us again and again and again. Two of the people who planned the Flight 253 event were released from Guantanamo Bay prison by the Bush administration in 2007. And as Eric has said, “the problem with places like Guantanamo is that if you weren’t a terrorist before you went in, you certainly would be once you got out.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Could it be the very people decrying what the current administration is doing or not doing are the same people responsible for rubber stamping the bad policy that got us here in the first place? Perhaps distraction from finding the core truth of the situation is a response, but what we haven’t done yet is react in a way that unravels the problem successfully. Our traditional logic seems to be defying intelligence. Could we bring ourselves to stop dithering in fear and get to solving the problem effectively? \u00a0Can we get smart on this, please?<\/p>\n

Asymmetrical warfare is the warfare of the present and probably the future if it continues to be successful. Yemen has long been on the list of known Al-Qaeda havens, and we have been attacking Al-Qaeda there for years. But that as we can see is not a solution, as Afghanistan and Pakistan can attest.\u00a0We are still a clumsy elephant, reacting out of fear with a big fisted hammer against a mercurial enemy when perhaps a soft scalpel and some long-term planning might be more effective.<\/p>\n

Those solutions, which Engel mentioned in passing on Maddow’s show, are still in development. Their fruits have not yet appeared on our radar. As we listen to the noise we call news, we remain mindful that we’re still hauling freight from mistakes of the past. In dealing with the airlines whose new responsibilities post Christmas Day 2009 means painfully increased scrutiny which we will need, we’re still going to have to pay for that excess baggage.<\/p>\n

Yours and truly,<\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan
\nSan Francisco<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend and Reader: Holy Mercury Station Retrograde, Batman. What every pundit from here in San Francisco to The New York Times could try to say about\u00a0Flight 253, also known in these parts as the Underwear Bomber event, none could be clearer than Rachel Maddow, with the help of NBC’s foreign correspondent Richard Engel on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,52,1054,1530,1626],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}