Dec
30

Wandering in the Warmth of Wishland

We can’t afford to rerun the ’90’s.  With the Obama team relent­lessly push­ing its crim­i­nal jus­tice model for deal­ing with ter­ror­ists it’s just a mat­ter of time before we once again, if we don’t already, have Jamie Gorelick’s Wall of Sep­a­ra­tion between the law enforce­ment peo­ple and intel­li­gence operations. From the Hot Air blog:

We tried this before, how­ever, in the 1990s.  It didn’t work out so well.  Oddly enough, Osama bin Laden never appeared in fed­eral court to answer his indict­ment, and the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion declined to have him deliv­ered to US cus­tody because we weren’t sure we could get a con­vic­tion in court.  This approach resulted in an esca­lat­ing series of attacks on US assets around the world dur­ing the 1990s, with hun­dreds of lives lost, and it cul­mi­nated in 9⁄11.

We just can’t afford another decade of play­ing Let’s Pre­tend.  How often is there a piece in the news where the source is “speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymity because he is not per­mit­ted to dis­cuss this” or some­thing like that? Daily?  So the guy is vio­lat­ing the terms of his employ­ment and betray­ing his employer (who is, in most cases, the Amer­i­can peo­ple) and telling the press (and any­body else who wishes to lis­ten in) things he isn’t sup­posed to.

It’s sur­pris­ing if you can get through an evening news broad­cast with­out hear­ing the phrase in this secret report.  Nor­mally some­one pre­sent­ing a report on net­work TV would be dis­in­clined to char­ac­ter­ize it as secret.  But not if you’re play­ing Let’s Pre­tend.
I admit play­ing Let’s Pre­tend does have its moments and there are harm­less ways to play it.
  • Let’s Pre­tend I’m Humphrey Bog­art and you’re Grace Kelly
  • Let’s Pre­tend we have mil­lions of dol­lars and are sit­ting in this café dur­ing a break in our trip to our place in the Hamptons.
There are many less salu­tary ways to play.  Even some dan­ger­ous ones.
  • Let’s Pre­tend I can fly.
  • Let’s Pre­tend I can drive home.
  • Let’s Pre­tend Major Hasan slaugh­tered all those peo­ple at Fort Hood because he caught Post Trau­matic Stress Dis­or­der from a patient, like a cold.
  • Let’s Pre­tend if we enthu­si­as­ti­cally beat our breasts about water­board­ing the ter­ror­ists will love us and leave us alone.
  • Let’s Pre­tend that when a father tells an embassy offi­cial that his son is in deep trou­ble, hang­ing with ter­ror­ists, and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous, that it doesn’t mat­ter if the report never gets made, gets made and then lost, or made, deliv­ered, and then not read.

Let’s Pre­tend we can take all the rent and gro­cery money and buy lot­tery tick­ets with it.  Cause one of ‘em’s gotta hit.

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Tags: reality, terrorist

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