Does This Sound Familiar?

Let’s see: an out-of-touch, slightly hostile candidate with an unglued, nightmarish wife, and a vice-presidential candidate who is a total stranger to the truth…about anything.  Is it 2008 all over again?  Stay tuned.

BTW…really, really DON’T open the windows on your jet.  Please.  Thanks.

Killing the Bogeyman

Every year I go through this:  I remember September 11, 2001.

That morning I went to the doctor for a blood-pressure check (ironically).  It was on the long drive from the doctor’s office to my job that I heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center and I remember thinking, “why can’t they leave that place alone?”

At first they thought it was a small plane or an old commercial jet liner (read: relatively small).  Keep that in mind.

You could see the former Sears Tower from the office where I worked, even though we were about 20 miles away.  All day we watched it for signs of something happening.  Most offices had closed and the occupants were on the way home.  We didn’t close because we had clients in the office that day who had nowhere else to go but a hotel room.

At lunch we tried to find an open restaurant.  We could not, and settled for some really bad cafeteria food in the building next to ours.  Later, driving home, it was like going through a war zone.  There were police on every corner.  Traffic was crawling even though there was almost no one on the road.  There was an eerie silence hovering over everything.

I exchanged numerous emails with a friend that day.  In one of them I remember saying something about Osama bin Ladin.  Right away I “knew” he had had something to do with it.

Since then, I have become less sure.

No, I don’t think he was a nice guy at all.  But I’m still wondering if he didn’t actually die of natural causes a few months after 9/11/01.  And I’m wondering  what the real story is on his official “death” just last year.  Yes, someone was killed, but who was it, really?  I guess you could answer by saying, “it was the bogeyman.”

What got me really going on this again was learning that Al Qaeda has never really existed as an organization.  Like guerrilla warfare, it is and was a tactic.  Allegedly Al Qaeda became an organization only after 9/11/01, because the U.S. government wanted to prosecute bin Laden and didn’t have applicable laws — so they wanted to use the old anti-Mafia laws instead.  To use those, bin Laden had to be the head of an organization…and so, Al Qaeda became an organization.

But that doesn’t touch the real point, which is this: the official story of 9/11/01 seems highly unlikely when one examines it closely — which almost no one has done save for a small band of 9/11 “truthers.”  Originally I thought they were the usual idiots who have theories about everything.  But then I started asking questions on my own.  No, I did not spend hours and hours examining tapes…I’m no good at that stuff.  But I just looked at the overall flow of the story and realized that it was too smooth, and I also factored in the almost incredible lack of response and initiative by the U.S. government while the attack was happening.

And then there was the news, which is vigorously disputed no more, about Building 7: it almost certainly did not fall on its own.  It was demolished.  And yes, there is a billionaire somewhere who benefited from this and later benefited again by demanding that U.S. taxpayers pay him to rebuild the building.

And then there’s the whole business with the Pentagon.  It’s probably the most vigorously secured building in the world.  How is it that there is no videotape of a plane hitting it?

And then there’s the issue of Flight 93…

And yes, it appears that certain people on Wall Street were betting on 9/11 happening just days or even hours before it happened.

Fast-forward to our present-day financial crises worldwide that seem to defy explanation if you don’t automatically accept that the needy masses caused them by being greedy — you know, wanting food and shelter and jobs and all that bullshit.

There is an entire generation entering adulthood as I write this who don’t remember what our little portion of the world was like in the years prior to that day.  I won’t write an entire blog entry about that, but I will say this: there was airport security.  I was refused entry into a waiting area at an airport when I went to pick up a friend.  This was in 1999.  Why was I branded a terrorist?  Because my purse had car keys in it.  Really.  And the security guards got quite nasty about it.

Again, this was in 1999.

Twenty-five years earlier than that, you could freely run though an airport like a kid running through a playground.  I did this in the early 1970’s, when I was a kid.  But there was airport security.  I remember seeing a man stopped, handcuffed, and hauled off by cops just as he was entering a plane.  This was, after all, just after the era of the Cuban hijacker.

Earlier than that, we actually (accidentally) ended up on a runway at O’Hare Airport — in a car — the day John F. Kennedy was shot.   No we were not arrested, searched, interrogated and then hauled off to jail.  We did not end up on the evening news amid dark insinuations about our motives.  We did not prompt a massive investigation by a government body.  We were merely pointed in the right direction and told  to get the hell off the runway before a plane rolled over us.

But after that, things started changing, slowly, steadily, over a period of years.  I’m starting to think that it wasn’t enough for someone.

I won’t go into all my theories here, but I will leave you with this: do not accept.  Look past the jingoism you will no doubt see mountains of today as you cruise the Internet.  Question.  Don’t accept.  Educate yourself.  In the end, you may end up with a clearer vision of what’s really going on.