Tales from Downtown Mudville

Funny story from here in Mudville last week: On Monday I glanced outside and remarked to the wife, "look's like it's gonna rain". On Thursday it did, but she still steadfastly refuses to acknowledge my prescience...

Anyhow, that's the news from Mudville this week. Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, I pointed out that Shepard Smith's claim that the actions of an elderly World War Two PT boat commander armed with a shotgun validated predictions that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans would be recruited by rightwing extremists was pathetic. Now I never said word one about the accuracy of the report, so now let me try to sum it up like this: if my tax payer dollars were going to pay meteorologists to tell me it might could rain sometime soon, maybe because it's rained before and there's still water available I wouldn't in a million years say they were wrong but I'd damn sure think I wasn't getting my money's worth out of that investment. But speaking of strange weather, here in the old blogosphere, it seems I started a sh@tstorm over whether that report was right or wrong or fair or not - and since then it's moved into the pages of the New York Times and other papers and back to television and back to blogs again with pretty much everyone piling on and everyone missing the point. (Which makes me wonder if I never should have brought it up in the first place, but I have to confess it's also been fun to watch what I started turn into whatever it is right now.)

Anyhow, in the latest chapter my friend Matt Burden appeared on Fox News to talk to Neil Cavuto about the whole thing. Now I don't want to get into what I agree or disagree with Matt about (it just wouldn't fit in this post that's already too long), or what he said or what Cavuto said (though when Cavuto says "we" I assume he's talking about TeeVee talking heads, him being one and all...) but I will say that Matt's already acknowledged he owes me cigars for that line about crashing a PT boat into the Holocaust Museum. (I hereby offer my "P.T. Boat captain - just like John F. Kennedy" quote that I used in my update about this homicidal journalist/filmmaker to anyone for the same price.)

And since it's my point in the first place, I have to admit I'm annoyed by the loud noise and distracting graphic that appears in that video right when Cavuto makes the point about whether World War Two veterans are what the DHS really meant when they said Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Since that's the version of the video that appears at Crooks and Liars and Media Matters (where they're determined to prove that the report is prescient - apparently in fear they might still have a reader who doubts that) I can't say whether that distraction was added by Fox News or one of those sites. (I also wonder why none of the various experts on this prescient report anywhere ever mentions that it was "not authorized, has been withdrawn and is being rewritten" - "The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed," Ms. Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. "The report is no longer out there," she said. "An employee sent it out without authorization." Funny, that seems like a significant point to me.)

Anyhow, to be fair, I can see where people who call themselves "right wing" could be offended by the report. Imagine the response from the AARP if the Department of Homeland Security declared that "some senior citizens, despondent over nearing the end of their hate-filled, wasted lives, may choose to commit suicide by cop and take out some of their perceived enemies in the process" - a point that James von Brunn's attack on the Holocaust Museum validates. Likewise, I can see where folks who consider themselves anything but right wing would get some false sense of satisfaction from the belief that von Brunn was one of them. But none of that changes the fact that political affiliation alone generally doesn't keep anyone from killing people or hacking computers, let alone come close to addressing what exactly we should do about it.

Anyhow, since I tend to think of these things along the lines of "how could I use this report if I was the intended operational user?" I wondered what I would do if I was head of one of Mudville's Tribal Counterterrorism Task Forces (don't laugh - they brings in the federal bucks) or the Chief of Police. I came up with "arrest the Republicans" but dismissed that quickly - the jail ain't that big. Then I thought we could confiscate the children of unemployed parents and put them in foster homes or re-education camps, since the report highlights that "there appears to be a strong association between a parent's unemployment status and the formation of rightwing extremist beliefs in their children" - but Mrs G said that was a stupid idea and wouldn't even talk about it any more.

So since the Chief of Police and the Sheriff and all the heads of the Mudville Tribal Task Forces had taken advantage of good weather to go fishing that day, I decided to post the report and ask my readers if they could think of any worthwhile actions that could be taken if they were one of those people. And one of them did offer a damn fine idea.

But as far as I know, that's about the only example of anyone anywhere actually contributing something worthwhile to the whole discussion. Oddly enough, that particular post didn't attract near the attention of the earlier one that didn't say anything other than well, Shep Smith sure got that wrong.

And I doubt this one will either - because it's a new week in America, and though the sun might shine mostly, there's a definite possibility that somewhere it probably might could rain.

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