Our Zack Roth just put together this profile of accused would-be bomber Faisal Shahzad. And like so many Islamic terrorists living in the West, what is most striking about Shahzad are the ways in which he was simultaneously alien to and also deeply embedded within Western culture. In one example, Shahzad’s descent into extremist violence seems to have coincided with getting in over his head on a home mortgage he couldn’t afford. The house eventually went into foreclosure.
George A. Rekers cofounded the Family Research Council with religious right icon James Dobson. And he’s been a key leader of the “ex-gay” movement for years, even testifying on behalf of the states of Arkansas and Florida in defense of their laws banning adoptions by gays and lesbians. Alas he was caught a few days ago coming home from a ten day European vacation with a male prostitute he’d found on Rentboy.com.
Rekers first claimed he didn’t know the man was a prostitute, then said he’d hired him to carry his luggage and finally went with he was trying to bring him the message of Jesus.
Sure BP and the Coast Guard are mobilizing to put out the fire, cap the leak and do whatever they can to keep all that crude oil from hitting the Gulf Coastline. But what about the real damage control effort? Which PR firms and top-tier flacks are working the press for each company in this disaster? We run down the list of top flacks in the Oil Spill Flack Universe. Lots of big Republicans and Democrats too.
Harry Reid, on financial reform: “Republicans are having difficulty determining how they can continue making love to Wall Street.”
Longtime House Democratic stalwart David Obey (D-WI) is expected to announce shortly that he will not seek re-election this year.
Justin Elliott takes a look at Halliburton’s role in the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf.
Seeing the coverage this morning of the almost-escape of Faisal Shahzad, I wonder if we don’t simply have unrealistic expectations. After all, if Mr. Shahzad’s plane had taken off, the Feds had … what? ten hours or more to figure out he was on it and easily have him taken into custody when his plane put down in Dubai? I remember having a similar sense with many of the so-called intelligence failures leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Surely, by definition, 9/11 was a colossal intelligence failure for the simple reason that it happened and killed so many people. But do any of us really think the default, operations as usual, is that every attempt to pull off a terrorist attack is found out ahead of time? Given the amount of freedom we expect walking the streets free from searches and easy international travel, that strikes me as naive.
Not that I expect this lead to any necessary conclusions or make anyone feel better. This whole incident happened about twenty blocks from where I live, where my wife and two small boys live; I’m hardly blase about it. But I wonder how much our expectations aren’t driven by television and the movies.
Curious what you think.
It continues to amaze me how the military (see, e.g., Jessica Lynch) and the FBI (the G-man stereotype) are so adept at turning the most discombobulated, random, messy and disjointed series of screw-ups into clean, smooth narratives — and how the media eat them up. Do they employ screenwriters to convert their epic foul-ups into plot lines we recognize from TV?
In yet another instance of this phenomenon, the story of how we came to apprehend the suspected Times Square bomber is starting to appear much less straightforward and far more bumbling than the initial reports yesterday. Read More
You would think that the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf would have brightened the chances for a climate and energy bill this year. In fact, it looks like just the opposite.
Jon Stewart breaks into a spontaneous rendition of “memories” when he realizes that Glenn Beck is now more sane and reasonable than John McCain.
See the video.