Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Over in the Better Universe.

On Sunday, in this Universe, this was the scene

”And then one day you find, it’s not ‘Global Terror As Usual...

“Your hair is gray


“and you wonder, ‘Will people still see me as a figure of international menace?’ ‘Is my career going down!’…”

Which is relevant why?

Because if you watched “Fox News Sunday” you saw one of two teevee outlets on which Fran Townsend delivered this message from her boss at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

Transcript from the AP

Bin Laden branded `virtually impotent'

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 15 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Seemingly taunting Osama bin Laden, President Bush's homeland security adviser said Sunday the fugitive al-Qaida leader is "virtually impotent" beyond his ability to hide away and spread anti-American propaganda.

The provocative characterization came just days after bin Laden attracted international attention with the release of a video in which he ridicules President Bush about the Iraq war and reminds the world that he not been captured.

Ahead of the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, White House aide Frances Fragos Townsend made a clear attempt to diminish the influence — or the perception — of the man who masterminded those attacks.

"This is about the best he can do," Townsend said of bin Laden. "This is a man on a run, from a cave, who's virtually impotent other than these tapes."

In appearance on two Sunday talk shows, she used the "virtually impotent" reference both times, suggesting the language was chosen with careful purpose.
…

Now if you don’t have access to a boyspeak translator, allow me to explain: Having your woman call out another man as impotent is double-dog-daring him to take a swing at you.

It’s using the international stage to go right after his recently retouched manhood.

It is a video dickslap at bin Laden, calling his mama ugly and trying very deliberately to goad him into take another shot at us.

It isn’t what any reasonably bright human above the age of 12 would mistake for statecraft.

It isn’t even just Dubya's regular pissy frat-rat “Bring ‘em on” faux machismo.

(And hey, remember how fucking brilliantly that little tantrum of peevish dick wagging worked last time when President Thinks-With-His-Nads dared Iraq’s nascent insurgency to kill more US soldiers?

As reminder, over four years ago -- in July of 2003 -- when the Commodore Codpiece just had to show the world what an ego-drunk badass looks like as long as he’s got 200,000 troops and 30,000 nuclear weapons to hide behind, 23 American soldiers had been killed in George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

As of this writing, 3,739 more have perished.

Ritual sacrifices made to one man’s malignant narcissism, and to his malevolent enablers.)

No this is stacking “Bringing it on” on top of “You little fag”…

…and then using the global throw-weight of Mouse Circus message delivery system to have your subordinate skirt rub his hair in it...

...in front of several million viewers.

So instead taking the actions a Real Man would take -- capturing or killing bin Laden when he had the chance, or going after him and the central nexus of al-Qaida terrorism in the Afghanistan/Pakistan frontier -- the whole of The Bush Plan has now devolved into nothing more than putting the perky Ms. Townsend in front of a camera on the Lord’s Day, six years after the murder of 3,000 Americans, and calling their murderer a pussy.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

That’s what was happening in this Universe on or about the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
…



Over in the Better Universe they mark the anniversary of 9/11 too.

Over there they honor the death of the 1,433 Americans who perished with flowers and prayers and hundreds of thousands of emails and letters sent back and forth across the Atlantic as a part of the “Middle Western/Middle Eastern Exchange” pen-pal program started by ordinary citizens and now coordinated by Vice President Edwards as part of the Gore Administration’s aggressive and broad-based Global Peace and Prosperity initiatives.

(Having repeatedly tried and failed to push a much more bellicose foreign policy and arrogate various presidential powers to himself, Holy Joe Lieberman was thrown unceremoniously under the bus at the end of Gore's first term.)

Six years on, the memory of the terrible day in September when the South Tower of the World Trade Center was hit by a hijacked civilian aircraft, and three other hijacked passenger jets had to be shot down by our air defenses (which had been brought to high alert weeks before by warnings that terrorists had been plotting to use aircraft as weapons and an August 6th, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US”) has not dimmed, but the nation has found some measure of healing and redemption in bold steps the they have taken as an ongoing memorial to the dead.

There was, of course, the lightening conquest of Afghanistan – the home base of the terrorists and the religious sociopaths who give them direction and purpose – followed by one of the most comprehensive civic rebuilding efforts in history.

“We are the last remaining superpower,” President Gore said, “and the world is small, and we are going to be involved in that region for the rest of our lives. This being the case we have to make it crystal clear right now that we are there to help build a lasting peace, and not to extract their natural resources to feed our SUVs. After all, what kind of message would it send to the world if America is seen as attentive only to countries with oil?”

Then, with the what some pundits began to call “New Montanastan” standing beside America as a firm ally and an example of both what terrible-swift-sword hell-on-Earth the U.S. can bring if you fuck with us, and what great benefits accrue to our friends, over threats of impeachment by the Republican Minority, the Gore Administration turned their attention to one of the region’s most pernicious exporters of violent religious extremism and terrorism: Saudi Arabia.

“Exporting your Wahabi bullshit is gonna stop,” Secretary of State Clinton was alleged to have said to Prince Bandar on her first official visit to the his country. “Funding people who kill Americans is gonna stop. Either you’ll end it, or we will do it for you.”

The next day, President Gore announced his “Greenhattan Project”: a massive National Security Initiative to pour one hundred billion dollars a year into researching cleaner, blended energy generation, distribution and conservation methods, with the goal of “pulling the world back from the brink of a global climate catastrophe” by making “America energy independent before the end of this decade”.

The day after the announcement, world oil prices fell by 13%.

A week later, representative of the House of Saud were at the negotiating table.

With all of this in motion, the 2004 elections became a national colloquy on how religious and ideological extremism – from McVeigh to bin Laden – not only imperils the lives of Americans, but our most sacred American values: privacy, tolerance, peace and freedom. Gore won re-election in a landslide, and other than in the most demented corners of America, Republican candidates who ran on a platform of Bible-based hatred and fear were tossed out of office in record numbers.

The Fox Network officially changed its name to the Fox Cartoon Network as audiences for its hysteria-based partisan claptrap dropped through the floor.

Brit Hume has since taken a job as Chief Weather Enunciator for the AARP Cable News, and Bill Kristol is now an adjunct professor at the University of Phoenix Online, where he teaches an elective called "ShouldaWouldaCoulda History".

Meanwhile, the slow-motion collapse of Hussein Regime in Iraq continues to pick up speed.

After weapons inspectors (backed by UN mandates, American firepower and a world sensitized by 9/11 to the need to rein in madmen) proved definitively that his regime did not posses any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, Hussein’s enemies, both internal and external, came gunning for him. Forces under his command still rule sections of Baghdad and a few other provinces, but he has lost control over northern and southern Iraq, and most of Iraq’s oil resources. Fearing assassination from every corner, he is rumored to sleep in a different safe house every night and has not been seen in public in two years.

And across the border – encouraged by events in the region and by American’s firm pledge to play the honest broker in the conflict between Israel and a de facto Palestine state, and stand with home-grown tolerant democracies wherever they arise -- a vibrant and distinctly pro-Western Iranian democracy movement seems to be bubbling up from every street corner in Iran. So say the intelligence services (which were radically restructured after 9/11 under the joint chairmanship of former President’s Clinton and Bush) and the steady stream of letters from the Middle East that began as one of President Gore’s first, almost accidental post-9/11 initiatives.

When he said, in response to a question from a reporter from Al Jazeera;

“We are a great and a good nation, whose greatest strength is our people. Our diverse, loud, hopeful, argumentative people. This nation will never kneel to tyrants. This nation will never cower in fear of terrorists. And because this nation fears nothing, we say to the world ‘Talk to us. Listen to us. Come to know us for who we really are, and let us know you. And let us, together, build a more peaceful world for your children and ours.’”

A week later, over in the Better Universe, ordinary Americans in schools, offices, churches, farms, blogs, stitch-and-bitches and book clubs -- looking for some more direct way to contribute and participate and honor those that had fallen on 9/11 -- took up the challenge of talking and listening to the rest of the world.

Within a year, one in twenty Americans had found a pen-pal in Iraq, or Syria, or Turkey or one of the “Stans”.

Mostly these days they drop each other a card for anniversaries or sympathies, or chat about babies and funerals, schools, weddings and food, illnesses, and the intransigence of teenagers everywhere and throughout all time.

Over in the Better Universe, people still fight over immigration.

People still cheat and steal and betray each other.

And people still die from cancer, or ethnic cleansing, or starvation, or just because they’re the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But over in the Better Universe life is better.

Because the people who live there fucking well demand it.