I've gotten some flack for the "terrortard" label this week, but I'm sticking with it. In fact, ha. That's right. Ha ha. Facts are stupid things, as Ronald Reagan once said, and the fact here is we're looking at four terrortards.
Is that offensive? Fine. Color me bad. I contend that it's no more offensive than Terror Brand News (aka Fox News) suggesting that it presents "fair and balanced" reporting. Fox's Sarah Bernhardt School of Reporting has infected all the big news sources when it comes to terror (the breathless gasp, pant, panic ("We'll be right back after this commercial break") approach). Is that not offensive?
Here's what we know: one of the "plotters" was deemed too crazy to deport to Haiti (what?) and all of them were garden-variety jailbirds for crimes like small time drug-dealling and purse-snatching and, one might surmise, littering. The ringleader told a judge that he's a daily wake-and-bake pothead.
These mentally diminutive men would have a hard time finding a synagogue (much less blowing one up). They do not qualify as "chilling" criminals. These are not great criminal minds. These are barely functioning minds
that use what little capacity they have for feelings of victimization,
petty resentment, and kitchen-table prejudice. The rest was imported
courtesy the FBI.
As Air America's Ron Kuby pointed out in his debate with Marc Maron yesterday, there was an FBI informant who made money off this "bust."
Facts are indeed stupid things. There are a lot of malcontents out there and the catalog of things they hate is endless. The anger that informed these half-wits was turned into a story by opportunistic third and fourth parties to that anger. I'll say it again. The brainless anger and hate native to the Newburgh Four was taught a plot and enabled by a third party who was working for the FBI; it was facilitated in a way that made a story where before there was no story because the four men involved could not think their collective way out of an open door.
The end product was a story. It was used to prove a point: that we are being protected from terrorism. Terrorism that never would have left the barstool were it not for proactive, entrapment-like "police work."
This is what Fox News begat with it's warped coverage on terrorism. This is the evil seed of Dick Cheney's flashlight-under-the-chin brand of politics. Witness the cottage industry of terror-as-entertainment. It's here, and it's really stupid.