They’re pissed. They’ve all been sitting on “Obama’s temper is blackity black black and this proves he wants to kill all the whities” article in various keys of feigned outrage at the sudden loss of decorum in our first black president. And in true petulant fashion, if they can’t get that, they will at least recycle their usual garbage about how a democrat will always fail to keep them safe because they aren’t petulant men-children like they are whose public tantrums strike at the very core of the League of Evil’s HQ.

In short, they are the ones who are living in a movie and unfortunately for us, they get to tell Congress what the rest of us think.

Well, you see, the Bush administration showed how you’re supposed to deal with a terrorist threat.

And it worked *so well*.

So why is Obama messing with a winning strategy?

(God, I hope the sarcasm above is obvious.)

“No Drama Obama”

...that’s exactly what I signed up for.  No (or at least fewer) conniving Reichwingers in positions of authority stirring up as much fear as possible in order to achieve their cynical policy aims.  And I like it that way.

After all, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.  But I guess some media people are too sophisticated to remember and pay attention to Mr. Sirling’s no doubt “outdated” thoughts about such things…

But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

What Americans were genuinely scared in response to this (attempted) “terrorist attack”, aside from the 300 who were actually on that fucking plane?

I don’t even think most conservatives are or were genuinely scared, but they love ginning up the fear of fear to try to make their nonsensical points.

9/11 was an absolute tragedy, and nobody will ever deny that.  But can we maybe someday get to a place of reasonableness in which we are prepared to accept that there is a 99.9% chance that 99.9% of us won’t ever be killed in a terrorist attack?  Can we accept that it makes far more sense to be scared of dying in a car accident or getting cancer or drowning in a swimming pool than it does to be scared of being killed by a terrorist?

“But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.”

Clearly, the best response to people being scared of something that they don’t actually have to be scared of it to flip out while assuring them that they don’t need to be scare of it.  If the person reassuring them isn’t flipping out, they’ll never get the message that they really shouldn’t be scare of this stuff.  Clearly.

Also, yes, they are upset because he’s not doing anything they can tag as black rage.

Unless Obama puts on a pair of tight pants with a sock down them, swaggers onto a battlship deck, and yells and screams that we are going to get the diaper bomber and fuck him like he’s never been fucked before until he is screaming for his mama, I won’t feel safe!

Scared, dammit.

He misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father…

I know conservatives usually want their leader to be a strong father figure who tells them everything’s alright, but they don’t usually come out and admit it. You’re a grown woman, Maureen. You should be able to deal with the monster in the closet yourself by now, just like the rest of us adults.

Like so many other political commentators, Maureen Dowd takes a lot of airplane trips.  I am convinced that there is a direct connection with the number of times a year one flies and the amount of anxiety expressed.  Then, at a certain point, when one is a real full-time traveller, one loses the anxiety and gets annoyed not with our lack of security but with the silly security measures

But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Wait…the President is supposed to tell Americans the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  That if we run around like chickens with their heads cut off everytime some loser fails to blow up a plane that means the terrorists have won.  That’s why they do terrorism…to scare people so they surrender their freedoms and fight the war for them.

As for the scared Americans?  FUCK THEM. 

Seriously.  There is no fucking reason to be stripsearched/patted down/naked scanned to TRAVEL IN A PLANE.  THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON TO PREVENT PEOPLE FROM USING THE BATHROOM FOR AN HOUR.

Honestly, I would rather go back to pre-911 security, save for the deadbolted pilot’s cabin door.  That deadbolt and the fact that Americans no longer believe hijackers want a ransom is the REAL security.

Taking off shoes?  BULLSHIT that I wanted Obama to stop.  I want to be able to take shampoos and lotions if I want to.  I want to be able to entertain my kids so they not only don’t drive me nuts, but don’t drive anyone else nuts either.

But no.  We’re scaredy cats and have to do whatever it takes to pretend we’re safe.

One of the few times when W really got it right when it mattered was in the days after 9/11, when I fully expected him to throw a screaming tantrum and swear that he would personally supervise the deaths of every brown person he could find, or else hide out in a secure undisclosed location, he actually came out in public and calmly told us he would do what he could.

He didn’t surprise me by exceeding my expectations very often, but he did in those first few days, I have to grant him that.

So it makes me especially sad to see the right wing screaming that President Obama isn’t getting “angry enough”.

Dr. Psycho:

I’m almost inclined to think that the wingnuts don’t really know what they want beyond simple white Christian authoritarianism. Either that or they have a shrine in their houses to playground bullies.

You know what the funniest, but not really funny, thing is?

Reactions like Dowd’s are PRECISELY what people like Osama bin Laden want.

That the diaper bomber wasn’t able to actually destroy the plane and kill 300 people doesn’t diminish the fact that his mission fulfilled its basic purpose - to create a sense of terror in the American government.  Even better to instill that terror in the minds of powerful and influential Americans, who have the ability to create even more chaos by instituting ridiculously wasteful and pointless security measures that don’t actually make us any safer, but do make us all a little more irritable towards each other, and do cost us billions and billions of dollars.

I mean think about it… one of the chief goals of OBL was to literally “bankrupt America”.  And he’s succeeding.  Since September 11, 2001, we have literally blown more than $1,000,000,000,000 taking actions which have done nothing to make us a substantially safer nation, but have managed to alienate us from much of the rest of the world, actions which have helped to drive our economy into the toilet, and created a level of nearly violent political partisanship that I have never witnessed in my entire life.

They say 9/11 cost Al Qaeda somewhere between $400,000-$500,000 to fully plan and execute, along with 19 deranged theocratic humans who were willing to sacrifice their own bodies in the process.

And the American reaction has been to spend over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS, maybe even TWO TRILLION in pointless wars and security initiatives, all as a direct reaction to a little plot that was dreamed up in a primitive cave with a relatively tiny amount of money that involved a set of boxcutters one could buy at Lowe’s for less than a hundred fucking dollars.

If Al Qaeda was an IPO whose stock price rose in direct proportion to the financial response by outside entities to its actions, and you had invested $1,000 in it on September 10, 2001, today you would be a fucking billionaire.

That’s how absolutely ridiculous all of this madness is.  We have literally gone fucking insane as a nation.  I mean, the people on television are describing an incident in which a crazy dude set his genitals on fire as a “terrorist attack”, and we’re responding to it by implementing a zillion new policies which are gonna cost us billions of dollars.  Think about it.  And nobody seems to get it.  Not only have we not remotely defeated “terrorism”, which, being an idea and not a tangible thing cannot be “defeated”, we’ve actually fed the beast beyond its wildest dreams.

OBL isn’t running and hiding… he’s praising Allah to high heaven because we stupid Americans have given him everything he ever wanted and much, much more, and now he knows that an actual attack isn’t even necessary at this point to get us stupid Americnas to behave like lunatics escaped from the asylum.  He just has to merely scare people into believing in the possibility of being attacked to get us to do all sorts of crazy shit, like, oh, I don’t know… shitting on the fucking U.S. Constitution?

If there is some alien species in the universe that can look at us microscopically like lab rats, they must find our nearly Pavlovian response to even the spectre of “terrorism” to be entirely predictable at this point.

The only way we “win” this deal is to quit giving cave-dwelling dickheads like OBL more notoriety than they deserve, and to get the fuck out of their land.  We need to say “Fuck you Osama, we’re done playing your stupid games”, we pack up our shit, and we go home.  We quit giving these assholes more airtime, dead tree space, and internet bandwidth than they deserve.  Their 15 fucking minutes are up.  And quit living in constant fear of our own fucking shadows, ferchrissakes.

You still wanna get Osama?  Send in a fucking covert ops CIA team long after we vacate that region and don’t tell a fucking soul that we’re doing it.  Case fucking closed and for the love of all that is good and decent in the world, let’s finally shut the fuck up about “terrorism”.

FDR was a fucking genius.  Fear is the only thing we have to fear, because look at what the fuck it has turned us into.  Goddamned lunatics.

Holy fucking Disco Ball.

No Drama Obama

And thank the stars for it.  Isn’t that what we want—nay, need—in our leaders?  Doesn’t that keep us all a little bit safer?  Hardly a pejorative.

Dowd has it back-asswards.  As usual.

One has to mock stuff like this, and mock it hard. Dowd is arguing for childishness, fear, and dependence in the public, and uncontrolled anger and bluster in the leaders. Even two thousand years ago people knew that was the wrong way:

No leader should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no leader should fight a battle simply out of pique. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Hence the enlightened leader is heedful, and the good leader full of caution.—Sun Tzu

(Of course, even if Obama isn’t invading Yemen, we’re still apparently doing drone strikes in that nation. Which is almost as bad.)

Fear is the only thing we have to fear, because look at what the fuck it has turned us into.

“Fire and Fear: Good servants, bad lords.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

For all my issues with Obama, at least he’s a goddamn adult. Which is more than I can say for Dowd, or for most of the voting age population of this sorry-ass country, which evidently doesn’t deserve to have adult leadership.

Versailles on the Hudson loves it when the President imitates Hollywood actors.  Look how much they loved Reagan for stealing Clint Eastwood’s line “Go ahead; make my day.”  It’s so much more fun than investigating how much Reagan’s budgets damaged the country.

Though watching President Obama say “I want these motherfucking terrorists off my motherfucking airplanes.” would be pretty cool, if only to watch Faux news explode about the Leader of the Free World saying “motherfucking”.