Commentary
"Terra, terra, terra!" but "where's the beef?"
By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor & Publisher


Aug 14, 2006, 00:43

Clair Pellar may have gone to that big Wendy's hamburger joint in the sky, but the question that brought her 15 minutes of fame is more relevant today with each "terror" scare: Where's the beef?

The latest "terror plot" is the most preposterous of all. Yet, the corporate media have taken to it like flies to honey while the sheeple are dumping all their liquids and gels into airport trash bins for the "privilege" of boarding an airliner, after waiting in interminable queues to be grotesquely searched and groped by perverse airport security personnel.

Imagine, we're being told that "terrorists" were plotting to blow up airliners by mixing liquid chemicals in the planes' bathroom cubicles, then detonating them, therefore, travelers will not be allowed to bring any liquids -- with a few exceptions and at the discretion of the perverse security personnel -- gels or toothpaste aboard the planes.

Instead, the potentially explosive stuff must be dumped in trash bins right in the airport terminals. Got it? You are to dump and pour your liquids and gels into trash bins, allowing the possibly deadly stuff to mix and go BOOM right in the terminal. It's for your own safety. Right? Perhaps you should consider that in the Bush-Blair-neocons' bizarro world it is less messy to blow you and the terminal up, rather than have all this debris raining down from the sky. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, however, plans to give 11 boxes of unopened, potentially explosive, items to the city's homeless shelters. Homeless population control?

You would think this would have raised some suspicions among passengers-in-waiting and the corporate media. But no. Not a peep. Certainly not by the media and the passengers they chose to quote or put on the air.

Okay, there haven't been any explosions in the terminals. But George W. and Poodle Blair must be laughing themselves silly over the stupidity of the "keep us safe at any price" crowd. You can visualize

Saturday Night Live Bush impersonator Will Ferrell gleefully saying, "Terra, terra, terra!"

This latest absurdity, allegedly hatched by Blair and his cohorts, would have us believe that a bunch of guys (the number of which keep changing), none of whom had airline tickets, some of whom had no passports and none of whom had whatever substances to make their bombs, were going to blow up 10 airliners. Despite that, according to the Brits, the Bushies conveniently messed them up by insisting the would-be perpetrators be grabbed now, despite the absence of hard evidence, making it nigh on to impossible under UK courts' evidentiary rules to convict the alleged wannabe "terrorists."

But does any of this bother the corporate media that regurgitates ad nauseum whatever "officials" (unnamed, of course) tell them? Have they all been lobotomized so that they are incapable of asking, "Where's the beef?"

Of course, it wouldn't occur to them that these "terror" alerts are trotted out whenever Bush and Blair need to divert attention from their current evil or their evil yet to come. Skepticism requires critical thinking and the ability to connect the dots -- none of which the corporate media mavens, most of whom also have erased the word alleged from their vocabularies, are capable of doing.

So to pile on, knowing there will be no questions asked by the media regurgitators, Blair and his home secretary, John Reid, have flipped out another fear card -- just in case the current one blows up, so to speak, in their faces. Why there are 24 more "conspiracy plots" under surveillance in the UK. Does this mean that Bush, who has vowed to preemptively strike "terr'ists" wherever they are, is going to have to do a "shock & awe" number on the British Isles?

Imagine what would have happened if they had thought of the "terrorist-terrorism" angle some 60 years ago, instead of the "godless Communist" one that vaporized with the fall of the Soviet Union. By now, every nation that didn't bow down to the fascist powers would be flattened.