Guts and glory

Exactly one week after Michael Chertoff's crypt keeper visage burbled up the threat level porridge expunged by his terror-sensitive gut, a gut notoriously insensitive to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, a US "intelligence report" warns us of al Qaeda "capabilities" that may redound upon the homeland.

U.S. intelligence believes al-Qaeda will continue to try to put operatives inside the United States, and anti-U.S. rhetoric continues to spread among radical Islamic Internet sites....

Which is confusing, really. After all, we're fighting them over there precisely because we don't want to fight them here. Have Bush and his trusty band of thoughtful neocons been ... wrong all along? But, wait. Like so many others, we're not supposed to remember that line, are we?

Rest assured, though, the "portions of a National Intelligence Estimate made public" indicate that Bush administration's efforts have "restrained Osama bin Laden's network from again attacking the United States." These would be the same kinds of NIE segments made public -- made that way by the White House -- that indicated Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, it is clear what is going on and it is tiring in its familiarity. With the "surge" looking doomed from the start, with Republicans flocking from the White House fold, with all manner of bad news emanating from Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is time to bring out the dead. American dead. In the homeland, anyway (it doesn't appear to matter how many die in Iraq). The White House is conjuring up the gruesome memories of 9/11 once again.

With Rove and Cheney running the show, their combined and leaden imagination can see nothing else but to dutifully flog the buggy-whipped political pony of al Qaeda to distract and rankle.

Yeah, we veered into Iraq, purposefully of course, but that doesn't mean we don't care! So, al Qaeda is still a threat, a revived and scary one, no less. But you have got to hate them more than us. Right? Besides, those Democrats have no idea what to do. They only talk about not blowing up more people. What pathetic wimps.

As we have see so often now, the media (I can scarcely call it "our media" anymore) trots out every single release the White House wishes upon it. This latest apparently can be used to cast aspersions upon the bunglers, but the Cheney administration knows that it won't. Not really. What is does, or rather, what it is meant to do, is keep the fear factor on high so that no matter what, the abuse can continue, the distraction serving to mitigate attention to and criticism of the escalating debacle that is the Iraq occupation.

If you don't believe me on this, why, let's let the servile Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich) dish up the goods by telling us that the release report is

an urgent public reminder that our nation faces a persistent and ongoing threat from al Qaeda and other radical jihadist groups.

Hoekstra, along with the happily departed Rick Santorum, cannot be forgotten as part of the dynamic duo who claimed, without ever setting foot in Iraq, that they themselves had found Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.