(Jubilant jihadi celebrates at the US Consulate in Benghazi. Photo Reuters).
I am listening to an NPR fund drive, streaming live from a city where I don’t live, and the jolly money-raisers comment wryly that they cannot stand the political advertising on every other media link, and that only public radio can provide the news without the oily hands of the politicians.
I grimaced, since the coverage on my favorite media outlet is so intrinsically committed to the progressive vision that they either can’t see it, or it is agenda driven and quite clever.
I don’t mind- it is fairly easy to shred out the spin that comes from people who have already made up their minds long ago about how things should be, and naturally support the means to arrive at the predetermined destination.
The point of the bile that rose this morning was the coverage of the outrage sparked by a remarkably crude video castigating the Prophet as a variety of unsavory things. Over the hours spent trying to figure out the final details on an end-of-the-fiscal-year proposal to the government, something began to crystalize as the details on the bloody events of 9/11’s anniversary began to emerge.
There was the usual blather in the wake of awful news. Some people seemed concerned about the affront to a great religion contained in an amateur video trailer that went viral in an Arabic translation. I watched it, just to calibrate myself, and since I find the militant exercise of most organized faiths to be vaguely offensive, decided this one combined the intellectual basis of a frat party with the production values of Plan Nine From Outer Space.
It is also free speech and protected by the Constitution. Get over it.
But with all the swirl of maybe-apologies and horror over the murder of the United States Ambassador and some brave young Marines, I realized what this was. It was the commemoration of 9/11. It was deliberate, and if different in methodology, was another act of war by the assholes we have been killing with such grim efficiency in two wars.
You can cut directly from the disturbances in Cairo to the military attack on the consulate safe house in Benghazi. The former had the trappings of the demonstrations about the harmless cartoon with the Prophet wearing a bomb in his turban, to the pre-positioned mortars carefully targeted against the Embassy safe house.
It was as deliberate as the Underwear Bomber in the jet over Detroit on Christmas Day.
It is a direct affront to the United States, and permit me to express it, a direct affront to you and me. The Bad Guys have doubled down again: clever, adaptive, implacable, and opportunistic. They did it again- successfully. How do you like the Arab Spring so far?
So what are we going to do about it? Set up a blue-ribbon commission?
We do not even recognize that we are in a war that has no deadlines for troop withdrawal. You cannot win what you will not even acknowledge, can you?
(Insert picture of Ambassador Steven’s corpse here. I took it out. Made me too angry.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com