Codename: Tim Osman
If anyone knows how to sell terror, it’s presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. In a Presidential race where even the grossly disaffected find themselves compelled to participate in the political process, however flawed it is, sloganeering seems to be at an all-time high. I’ll be the first to admit it–slogans make understanding some of the most complex challenges ever engineered…I mean faced…by our democracy a lot easier to swallow. For instance, Senator McCain’s campaign has reduced the peril and desert-like future America’s young people stare in the eye to three bulleted items which are affectionately titled “Bold Solutions.” And they are?
- Winning the War against Islamic Extremists
- Reforming Health Care for All Americans
- Reforming Government
That’s right, just three quick steps to fixing our estimated $9 Trillion-dollar debt, repairing shattered relations with basically every country that didn’t join, or bailed out of, the Coalition of the Willing (which sounds like some kind of pet name a cult would give to its sacrificial initiated), and relieving the working poor of their massive tax burden.
Well, certainly the Straight Talk Express will be making a stop in a former-manufacturing-job-headquarters-turned-barren-ghost-town near you for a more elaborate explanation, probably involving Senator McCain’s vow to “find some really good people” who know how to fix the problems he admittedly knows nothing about, like the ECONOMY. Hey, everybody has their weak points, even a U.S. President. So in the spirit of fairness, balancedness, trustedness, and yes, even truthiness, I’ll focus on McCain’s slam-dunk strongpoint. Where’d my bulleted list go? Ah, there it is, “Winning the War against Islamic Extremists.”
I had the pleasure of reading a proposed Master’s thesis over the span of a couple months written by a co-worker’s husband. The guy seemed nice enough, and I was nothing short of spellbound to see what kind of critical thinking skills the US Army was endowing its ranking officers with. The man informed me his topic was Islam, and that he embarked on months of exhaustive research, even taking off from work to dedicate his efforts solely to writing the thesis.
He turned it over to me no more than two weeks before it was due, and it was roughly 45 pages single-spaced. I entered this paid mission with the understanding that English was not his first language, so the grammar and spelling was only minorly upsetting. What really struck me, was that he had basically tailored his research to write a doctrine of scary quotes from the Quran about what to do with the infidels, the non-believers, and he even put some of what he must have felt were the most hard-hitting excerpts in bold red print. You know, in case the person reading his thesis needed extra guidance in figuring out just how frightening of a relgion Islam really is.
To top it off, he countered a lot of the anti-Christian sentiments in the Quran and some other Muslim texts with….you guessed it….quotes from the Bible. Like the days of my youth caught between two bickering parents, I could feel the searing-hot sting of clashing ideologies through my computer screen. In the end, he subtly suggested we needed to address the serious threat of Islam extremism more seriously. More seriously than, what? Than we do now? I handed back his thesis to him with 177 edits, and he phoned me a couple days later to let me know he ‘wouldn’t have time to look into all of them’. I tried not to make a single mention of the fact that his paper was fundamentally flawed, or even hint at it. If I find out he is awarded his Master’s degree, I will apply to that particular University’s graduate program the same day.
That was not a digression, per se, as John McCain essentially relies on the same narrow-minded faith from the voting field. Well, not that Obama is much different. He’s out touting the “change” slogan while he votes to maintain Iraq War spending, part of the Democrat stay-in-office strategy that demands they not look like they aren’t ’supporting the troops.’ Yeah, ok. I’ve seen future weapons.
Notice that the definition of defeating terrorism has broadened from “Get Bin Laden” to “Get Them” ever since he slinked off into the hills of Pakistan. I periodically visit the FBI’s Most Wanted page and one thing that I noticed was interesting was the lack of mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden’s rap sheet. Here, www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm Check it out for yourself.
As for Codename Tim Osman, the conventional wisdom is that when someone links 9/11 back to the U.S. government, they are a whack-job living in a basement, primarily investing their time doing research on how Reptilian aliens have infiltrated Earth’s governments and the rest of it on World of Warcraft. However, when I stumbled on claims on the notorious Jeff Rense website www.rense.com and various other sources claiming Bin Laden was trained by the CIA and radicalized to combat the Soviets, I had an immediate flashback to these people:
Surely, the US State Department would have a deadpan, substantive, final rebuke to this outrageous claim. Right? Well, when I ventured to the wasteland that is their “info” page, I found a link called “Did the United States Create Osama Bin Laden?” Just the fact that they made you click the link for an answer is disturbing. But once inside, I was stunned to find that the agency with more information access than any other in the world was quoting, who else, but CNN as the source that US funds sent to the ISI during the Cold War never went directly to Bin Laden. As a matter of fact, they even quoted a secondary source quoting a secondary source, namely some guy’s book. Yeesh.
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