This Morning, Heads Will Roll

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 30th, 2009

Observations:

1) Dan Senor was disappointing in his embrace of the gotcha. Has he ever heard of group think? When you suppress the revision of such an important chain of events for fear that the original take will be seen as an essential failure, you allow that failure to regenerate. Who cares if the President went out with that same old ‘it’s safe to fly’ reassurance the day of the attack? That’s what Presidents do.


The criticism from the right and the analysis that claims frustration with that initial reassurance is hypocritical beyond all boundaries. That Bush took 6 days to respond to the shoe bomber, that it is obstruction not lucidity that’s both a goal and a cause of this particular failure, take your pick but both then and now, the right has no standing in this and can only expose themselves to morally reprehensible agendized opportunism.


The left is faced with the tough task of cleaning up an absolute mess in the face of a useless 40% minority bent on obstruction and gotcha. Our leadership must find the difficult will to knock the skulls of the various governmental agencies who refuse to talk together in such a way that this perpetual sandbox politic in our intelligence and anti-terrorism bodies is humiliated out of existence. The only way forward is demonstrable virtual accountability, and thus, heads will roll.


The space shuttle Challenger blew up despite of months of warning. Those warnings were repressed not by lucidity, but by agenda. It is in every textbook as the event that most captures group think, and I would hope that it’s not replaced by this event as a more current example of a parallel occurrence.


2) It took the same media that’s blasting the administration for it’s self correcting story 6 full days to come up with some of the most pertinent facts. Why are you beating up the TSA about its screening of passengers as they board a flight? For 5 days you showed magnetometer after magnetometer and never once made the point that the screening you are projecting upon Janet Napolitano was actually conducted by the Dutch government. That’s the same country that provided the solution via the Dutch citizen who foiled the attack. There is not a TSA crew on the ground in these foreign airports feeding us these security prone flights.


The failure that is Janet Napolitano’s is purely a database breakdown. The TSA is only responsible for approving the passenger manifest against the no fly list, and some part of that is additionally contracted back to the airline. That today the Dutch government took the step to make a 100% full body scan requirement is an indicative step that they are in fact responsible for not letting bombs on planes originating from their soil. The TSA audits these airports, but that’s like sending in a C student to grade the class, where the Dutch, French, and Germans are A students not by aspiration but by absolute necessity.


The media should take a second and examine itself. What’s lost is dissecting the information that is helpful from the information that is sensational. It’s exasperating to watch important elements of a story left on the no fly list by journalists, just so the red herring can make it’s plane on time.


3) What a wonderful insight, albeit a short one to compare the failure that was this passing decade with other dreadful decades. I tend to agree that the decade reads like a ‘what I loved about 1942’ article. I’m just not sure that the old adage “how can we know where we’re going, if we don’t know where we’ve been?” is up to today’s standards.


We know the history of these past few decades back to front and front to back, so what’s changed given that each of the fundamental mistakes are set to repeat themselves ad infinitum until mounting systemic failure brings us as a country back to the pack?


Obama’s poster simply said “Hope”. But for a freedom loving, free enterprise driven, American like myself, I’m feeling the same box around my hope that Iranian students are feeling around their fundamental freedoms. That box is fortified with anti-usury, pro-corporate mechanisms that seem to be working against the many in subservience to maybe the top 1% of the population. It may be despicable to compare my next level frustration with the existential frustration of Iranians that are dying trying to get where we were as a nation 240 years ago, but it might also bear insight. We are still in need of “Hope” and “Change” equal to that at election day. So are the Iranians.


That’s all today, see you tomorrow.