If The Mumbai Terror Attack Occurred on January 21st, the GOP Media Shills Would be Blaming Obama

MARK KARLIN BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG

It's Thanksgiving, a holiday when we count our blessings and bask in warmth of family and friends.  It's a uniquely American celebration of peace, when native-Americans and the Puritans who emigrated to North America nourished each other with food and friendship.

This year, our autumnal feelings of gratitude are disrupted by a ghastly terrorist attack in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) by a fanatical Islamic group of as yet uncertain origins.  But we do know this, residents of the U.S., the UK, and Jews were specifically targeted (although the bulk of those killed will almost certainly be Indians), and despite it happening on foreign soil, if it had occurred on January 21, 2009, the right wing GOP talking point chamber would have blamed Obama.

BuzzFlash, having shared both the theft of the 2000 election and 9/11 with our readers, knows that we were terrorized by Islamic fundamentalists -- and then terrorized for years by our own illegitimate governnment.  The goal of terrorism is to instill fear and dysfunction in its targeted population, and the Bush Administration accomodated Al-Qaeda in all of its objectives. 

We are reminded, as we report on the dreadful news from Mumbai, that terror is not meant to tactically win a military war; it's aim is to achieve the breakdown in the normal psychological and social order of its stated "enemy."  In the case of Al-Qaeda, it was also to economically drain the U.S., which it did with Bush's folly in attacking Iraq -- not to say the added boost of letting thieves and riverboat Republican gamblers let loose on Wall Street.

Bush read "My Pet Goat" after 9/11 and later his aides told him to claim that there was nothing he could have done to have prevented the destruction of the Twin Towers and the deaths of more than 3000 individuals.  But he had been warned just a few weeks before that fateful September days that Al-Qaeda planned hijackings in the United States -- and he did nothing to put airports on alert.  In fact, he dismissively kicked the CIA briefer out.

Now, the second 9/11 has occurred, this time in the financial capital of India.

Yes, it's on foreign soil and may be more related to the festering Hindu/Islam conflict than to the United States, but in the mind of Islamic terrorists the two are integrally connected.  Bush's "war on terrorism" has failed the world again.

This Thanksgiving, we can and should still be eating turkey (or a vegetarian meal) to bask in the delight of a "harvest holiday" amidst people whom we treasure.

But we should also be thankful that democracy unexpectedly prevailed this election, and we were delivered from a government who responded to the challenge of terrorism by attempting to dismantle democracy and instill fear in us all.

Obama is a follower of Lincoln and FDR, of course.  It is the latter who immortally said: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

To those who died on 9/11 and in Mumbai, we will mourn your loss, but we will strengthen our resolve to restore our Constitutional principles and our economic strength, because that is the only way we can truely defeat the core objective of terrorism.

This Thanksgiving, we will pray to have the strength to live free from fear, because liberty is the biggest weapon that we have against the deranged fundamentalists of the world -- both those abroad and those in the U.S.

For that, we can sit down to a meal of thanks among relatives and friends, and recommit ourselves to this great American experiment of government of the people, by the people and for the people.

MARK KARLIN BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG

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