The Circus Is Back

The circus is back in town but the clowns haven’t changed. The other night on Jon Stewart’s show a 3 month old tape of Tony Snow, the administration press secretary, was viewed in which he stated emphatically that the lawyers in the justice department had been fired for incompetence. At a recent press conference a reporter asked a question regarding those lawyers and prefaced it with Tony Snow’s statement that they had been fired for incompetence. Snow immediately interrupted and said that we had never said that those lawyers were fired for incompetence. Jon Stewart then ran the two tapes side by side. Who are you going to believe? Tony Snow or Tony Snow? Which one is lying?

Now let’s look at a sad viewer of an unfunny circus. A retired NYC cop lost a son in 9/11. He was told at the time by his President that the Iraqis were responsible for the disaster. Being old fashioned (as he says) the cop accepted everything his President told him because he (the cop) believed that his President “walked on water.” So if the Iraqis destroyed those buildings and killed thousands of people and his son then, let’s go get them. Then another thought occurred to him. He would like to have his son’s name put on one of the “smart bombs” that our Air Force was dropping on Iraq. After much hassle he managed to get it done and the Defense Department sent him a picture of the bomb with his son’s name on it with the date that it was dropped.

Despite that it wasn’t true over half the country believed that it was the Iraqis who destroyed the towers. All the soldiers fighting in Iraq believed it. Sometime afterward the President is shown on a video tape saying that he never said that Iraqis were responsible for 9/11.When the cop heard this, he went into shock. He could not believe it. When the realization that his President had lied, hit him, he was dumfounded. When asked if he was sorry that his son’s name was on a bomb, he was unable to reply. He was just bewildered.

During the invasion of Iraq some 50 or more “smart bombs” were dropped none of which hit their military targets. They did destroy homes and people but no soldiers. The mainstream press did not report this. Rumsfeld and the Defense Department steadily maintained that the “smart bomb” does not cause “collateral” damage. As an American that’s all you need to know.