Old news today
September has come and gone, before it arrived it occupied a place of honor among the months of this year as a time when decisions would be made, and new roads opened up.
You don't need me to tell you that it didn't work out that way. The successful surge by the administration swept all before it, Congress, press and pundits. The only new roads that might open up are those of additional war and destruction, and that has been left up to the executive branch.
Let's face it, apart from being a noisy way to spread dollars around to the rich and connected, Congress is totally useless in the scheme of things. They want to be useless, keep their snouts in the trough, and fatten.
When Rep. Harman said that Congress was warned of a terror threat to the capitol before voting on the FISA law, it provoked a few mordant chuckles here, why would any self-respecting terrorist bother to blow up Congress?
As for the press, they specialize in yesterday's news today. Sometimes it's by design (the NYT holding up news of illegal wiretapping), usually it just happens, like the latest bombshell that the US tortures. Today's news is not news at all, it's just a press release that goes though the charade of leaks by 'official sources'.
The unasked and thus more interesting questions are:
You don't need me to tell you that it didn't work out that way. The successful surge by the administration swept all before it, Congress, press and pundits. The only new roads that might open up are those of additional war and destruction, and that has been left up to the executive branch.
Let's face it, apart from being a noisy way to spread dollars around to the rich and connected, Congress is totally useless in the scheme of things. They want to be useless, keep their snouts in the trough, and fatten.
When Rep. Harman said that Congress was warned of a terror threat to the capitol before voting on the FISA law, it provoked a few mordant chuckles here, why would any self-respecting terrorist bother to blow up Congress?
As for the press, they specialize in yesterday's news today. Sometimes it's by design (the NYT holding up news of illegal wiretapping), usually it just happens, like the latest bombshell that the US tortures. Today's news is not news at all, it's just a press release that goes though the charade of leaks by 'official sources'.
The unasked and thus more interesting questions are:
- Why was this leaked/disclosed now? (Like the 2005 torture memos the NYT just reported on.)
- Why was this old news reported now? (Like the report that the Israelis knew that the USS Liberty was a US navy ship when they attacked it.)
posted by Dick Durata at 11:59 AM
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