Who Says a Terrorist Attack Has to be In an Airplane? How the GOP Threatens Our Lives.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By Mark Karlin

Yesterday, I wrote a piece on how the GOP needs terrorists in order for the Republicans to terrorize Americans, because otherwise they have no platform other than basically eliminating taxes for the wealthy and corporations.

And one of the most pernicious results is that the Republicans endanger America by forcing the issues into a frame of almost solely airlines safety.  The stark reality is that people who want to blow up Americans can use commonly available farm chemicals and fertilizer or the blind sheik trying to blow up a World Trade Center building in the early '90s with a car bomb.

While the Republicans are scaring us to death about preventing a plane being blown up, which is almost impossible in the long term, our entire nation is subject to attack from within without any screenings, scanners, or body searches. It wouldn't take -- as we wrote several years back -- a lot of work for a terrorist to float a nuclear warhead up the Hudson in a cargo container and set it off with a cellphone.

While the GOP forces the political debate -- through FOX and general Democratic wimpiness -- to focus on preventing planes being blown up, there's very little effective effort to keep our downtowns, malls, and legislative centers from being blown away. The GOP enables terrorism, because the entire party runs on one grade of gas: opportunism.

Integrally related to the GOP tacit alliance with terrorists in terrorizing America is the fact that one of the most dangerous threats comes from the right-wing heirs to Timothy McVeigh, the militia movement, the Turner Diaries, etc, being stoked on by FOX and politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.  

In a series of year-long gun attacks on American by Americans who believe Glenn Beck and his right-wing media colleagues that white males are victims and guns are their defense against "Socialist Tyranny," the U.S. is confronting a possible "lone wolf" terrorist attack, and one might consider many of these shooting terrorist attacks by those who have heard the siren song of "patriotic" armed rebellion implied by Beck and his right-wing media cohorts.

The right-wing media, and particularly FOX and Limbaugh, have developed an encapsulated pathology that justifies attacks on the government because in their delusional worldview, the federal government is illegitimate.

While the Republicans endanger America with their political posturing on potential airplane terrorist acts -- and their hero George W. Bush was warned of 9/11 type hijackings and did absolutely nothing to prevent that infamous day -- those of us who don't want terrorist attacks see a landscape where either fundamentalist-deluded Muslims or FOX-deluded white males present a clear and present danger to terrorist attacks on the ground, ones that can be carried out with much more ease than trying to board a plane with an explosive device. 

So not only do the Republicans endanger America by trying to score political points and forgetting how vulnerable we are to foreign "cell" attacks on the ground, but also the GOP and its media shills foment domestic terrorism that is an equal threat to our lives.

Some would call Dick Cheney and his "crew" traitors.

BuzzFlash would be among them, because we value life.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG