This excerpt from an NPR call-in show last week is pretty chilling:
TOM ASHBROOK: Certainly inequality's a big issue. Let me get a call right here from New London, Connecticut. AndDon. Hi, Don. You're on the air.
CALLER: Hi.
TOM ASHBROOK: Hi.
CALLER: I think you should be listening to this guy, Judson. I'm an unemployed nuclear engineer. I've worked on 13 nuclear power plants. Making a dirty bomb is not a big deal. I'm not going to go out and tell everybody now to do it, but I'm just saying things like that can happen. And it sounds like you're just being dismissive of all his ideas and what he's saying. Because there's a lot of anger out here, and there are a lot of people who feel that the American Dream is slipping away from them, they don't have a chance. And the only entrepreneurial opportunity for them is to sell drugs and to be an outlaw. It's happening.
TOM ASHBROOK: [OVERLAPPING] I hear you, [PH] Don. We've got Bruce on for an hour. So, I can't say we're not listening to him. But let me ask you, you've got a lot of expertise in your field, nuclear engineering. But does that mean you're unhappy if you're unemployed? Do you really feel like the country's ready to revolt?
CALLER: I'm not an expert in revolution, and I don't really know how they happen. All I know is I'm 60 years old. There's not a lot of people who want to hire a nuclear engineer who's 60 years old. And there are a lot of people out there like me who are out there who, you know, once you have so much gray hair, you're out of here. And there's just a lot of people that are just not happy with the way that the country's going right now.
And I don't know...where it's going to take it, or what's going to be its spark, or what's going to be the event. But people feel like there's just no way to climb out of the hole. Like there's just nothing that's going to get them out. This attitude, that I've seen, over 60 years, I've never seen anything like it. It scares me.TOM ASHBROOK: Up against it. And with an education, a particular education. Don, thank you for your call.
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Re: Suburban sprawl makes us relatively invulnerable to nuclear terrorism.
Except for those suburbs downwind, where the fallout would be ugly since a terrorist nuke would almost certainly detonate at ground level, creating lots of nasty radioactive debries.
Re: Forget terrorism via airplanes...do it by trapping people in airports.
Back in 1986 a jet liner crashed during take-off onto I-94 oustide Metro Airport, Detroit. The freeway was incinerated, and closed for some time for repairs. Traffic was unpleasant for a while on the west side of the metro area (I lived there), but the place was hardly gridlocked. There's a lot of redundancy in our road system. You could create major headaches by destroying some key interchanges, but it would be pretty impossible to bring everything to a standstill.
"Here's a not just five names, but a whole baker's dozen of names for you:
William Ayers
Noam Chomsky
Ramsey Clark
Barbara Ehrenreich
Van Jones
Naomi Klein
Michael Moore
Katha Pollitt
Susan Sontag
George Soros
Oliver Stone
Jeremiah Wright
Howard Zinn"
Okay, we know that African-American worship traditions freak you out, so that explains Wright. And anyone who lists Noam Chomsky as a prominant figure in American liberalism is obviously stupid. But what exactly did Moore or Stone or Ehrenriech say to get your panties in a twist. Given your gross distortion of Sontag's post-9/11 essay, I suspect it was stuff that normal folks would find relatively unobjectionable in the cold light of day.
Mike
Van Jones appeared on the same Troofer list as did several prominent CONSERVATIVES, all of whom made the same claim as Jones himself: that they had been lied to by the survey creators, and that the final list had entirely different language than what they had actually signed their names to. It's ironic that Crusty here is actually siding with the Troofers, by taking them at their word, in order to bash one of them uppity Obama appointees.
Crusty, you conveniently ignored my question about how what Susan Sontag wrote was an apology for 9/11 so your list is worthless.
It's a waste of time to ask this again but please provide proof of how the individuals you've listed "apologized" for 9/11. Like with any good argument, you'll need to start with a definition of "apology." I think you are a little confused about what an apology is.
And now you add another bizarre claim about how one in three Democrats is a "truther." Of course you won't offer any proof of it.
I had you pegged as whiny baby about a week ago when you claimed that you were so poor and rejected by those mean, Blue State liberals because you're a Christian or a conservative or whatever. And now you come onto this thread talking about those liberal "elites" who drink soy-lattes and eat croissants. The chip on your shoulder is pretty obvious.
If anyone rejects you because of your political opinions there's something wrong with you. The only people who make this claim are either loudmouths who drive off anyone who disagrees with them or people who are looking for the opportunity to be a big martyr for their cause of choice. Decent, civilized people can remain friends with people who disagree with them about politics or religion.
Well, it's like everyone suspected. Sontag 'crowed' that America was attacked...by explaining why it was attacked.
Why, that's horrible. We must instead operate as if causes have no effect. I'd like you point to a single thing she said that wasn't true.
Barbara Ehrenreich is on the list for the same reason, except she didn't even state the cause. She just said that calling people evil and using that as an explanation of their behavior isn't a very useful way to operate, that clearly they had some actual motives besides 'being evil'.
As it was pointed out, Bush's entire strategy, post-invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, is predicated on the idea that if we help the middle east not be such a craphole of poverty and dictatorships, maybe they won't attack us.
And, incidentally, listing names is not enough. You need to list, in some manner, what they actually said or did. (We sorta assumed this was obvious.) Half these people I have no idea what they supposedly said.
For example, Katha Pollitt. Are you talking about her anti-flag anti-jingoism rant? I see absolutely no evidence she's said anything about 9/11. She simply said that the right stole the symbol of the flag, and the left shouldn't start waving them.
Likewise, Naomi Klein. What the heck has she said? She makes a quiet clear case that American businesses have been exploiting disasters for decades, and have even deliberately caused a few, so she'd be a natural 9/11 truther...except when asked point blank about that, she dismisses it as 'conspiracy theories'.
And Ramsey Clark? Really? You expect us to even slightly fall for that? I can't even imagine what you're talking about.
George Soros, of course, says a lot of controversial stuff. Let's see which one you think is 'crowing'. (I suspect the one where he pointed out that the war in Iraq has killed more innocent civilians than 9/11. Which is, of course, true. There's a lot of debate about how many Iraqi civilians have died, but it's certainly more than 3000.)
Right there, four names on your list. State what they said. Actually, state what you're talking about with all of them.
And Van Jones we've already discussed to death. He didn't sign what people think he signed. He signed something calling for more investigation into 9/11. Later, that petition was attached to 9/11 truther stuff.
Howard Zinn, OTOH, is a truther...of course, he's not a Democrat and 'the left' as commonly understood won't have anything to do with him. (He calls himself a Democratic Socialist...poor Bernie Sanders having to share a name with him. Although it's not an actual political party.)
Noam Chomsky, likewise, exited 'the left' a very long time ago. (Oddly enough, he got kicked out because of pointing out that banks appear to run the country. Which I think we've all recently noticed appears to be correct.) Seriously, you don't know the status of Noam Chomsky in the Democratic party?
Good grief. If they're representatives of the left, David Duke is a representative of the right.
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