CSotD: T.G.I.T.
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As Gary Varvel (Creators) points out, the terrorist attack in New Orleans has every American praying, or, at least, it has every American who prays praying.
And Clay Bennett (CTFP) says that the ISIS attack has taken the happiness out of the New Year.
While Walt Handelsman, who lives in the Crescent City, rallies his fellow citizens with a staunch determination not to give in to terrorism.
All of which raises a critical question: Says who?
Not the resilience part, or the prayers, or the extinguishing of celebrations.
The “terrorism.” The guy had an ISIS flag and he’d posted some pro-ISIS messages and he even said he’d joined ISIS. But he also had a nasty divorce, a couple of bankrupt businesses and a house on the verge of being repossessed by the bank.
None of which, mind you, would keep him from joining ISIS, and, apparently, nothing keeps anyone from joining ISIS. On MSNBC yesterday, a terrorism expert explained that you can join ISIS simply by saying you’ve done so. There’s no membership form to fill out, no dues to pay, no training, no need to fly to wherever they are these days.
Which reminds me of Y.I.P.P.I.E., which I think had the same membership policy, but was mostly a joke. I’m a Y.I.P.P.I.E., he’s a Y.I.P.P.I.E., she’s a Y.I.P.P.I.E., they’re all Y.I.P.P.I.E.s, wouldn’t you like to be a Y.I.P.P.I.E. too?
But joking aside, it also reminds me of an interview I did with Bobby Seale, in which he said that one of the problems the Black Panther Party had in its fading days was that any Black poseur who could get himself a black leather car coat and a beret could hold himself out as a Panther, which totally diluted the Party’s serious intentions as a political action group.
That was in 1981, IIRC, but it shed some light for me on a fellow who breezed through Boulder a decade earlier, touting his Panther cred and impressing enough people that, while he didn’t set up any free breakfasts or alternative school programs and he didn’t challenge any racist policing policies, he did manage to spread trichomoniasis through the radical community, where — I am not making this up — it was known as “The Revolutionary Clap.”
And I’m 110% sure he was no more a Black Panther than I was.
The connection being that the FBI has said the perpetrator of the truck attack “was inspired by ISIS,” which makes it a terrorist act.
And that answers my question of “Says who?” but brings up another one.
I can’t help but think that, if the fellow said he’d been inspired by Batman, had carried comic books in his truck and claimed to have joined the Justice League of America, we’d be focusing more on his divorce, his financial problems and his mental health.
Rather than a terrorist, he’d be classified as a lunatic. Which would make no difference to the people he killed and injured or to any of their friends and family members, but would really ruin things for politicians, columnists and cartoonists.
As Bill Bramhall points out, the attempt kind of fizzled to make the attack part of an obsession with those violent criminal migrants who exist almost entirely in Dear Leader’s head, and it particularly sucks that he was a Texan, because Texas is a MAGAt stronghold. If he’d been from California, they might have declared him “woke” and gotten some mileage out of it.
Well, thank god he didn’t say he was inspired by Batman or they’d have nothing to hang their little red hats on.
And fuggettabout that other guy, the one in Las Vegas, because he was from Colorado, and not the John Denver part but Colorado Springs, home of Focus on the Family and the Navigators.
And I won’t say what kind of car that guy was driving because I don’t want to get sued, but I will point out that coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing repeatedly said they were driving a U-Haul, so man up, little muskrat.
Anyway, Thank God It’s Terrorism, because it gives us another reason to look for commies under our beds, it gives cartoonists like Chip Bok (Creators) something to be frightened of and, best of all, it gives the government plenty of clearance to increase the degree to which they also look under our beds.
I’ll grant Mike Beckom (Counterpoint) this: He doesn’t appear to be falling for that ISIS thing, and credits the horror to access to weapons, absorption of loony-toon concepts and general evilness, with a side helping of hate.
Even if you write the New Orleans attack off to mental illness, the fact remains that, when his gears began to slip, he picked up on the ingredients Beckom lists.
He gravitated towards ISIS, not to the Justice League of America, and we’ve seen demented motivations before in a variety of mass shootings we didn’t think to classify as “terrorism” though they most certainly scared the bejeezus out of the folks targeted.
Rob Rogers notes the difference between a “terrorist attack” and a “mass shooting.”
He’s right, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Focusing on fighting terrorism is a great excuse to increase snooping, surveillance and curtailment of civil rights, while Rogers is right in his implication that perhaps we might do well to shift some of that energy towards keeping six-year-old schoolchildren from being slaughtered.
But the Feds have just released a new video of whoever was planting pipe bombs back on January 6, 2021, because terrorism is more of a priority.
Which reminds me that, back when that faux-Panther was sleeping his way around Boulder, the FBI was watching a house where a draft counselor had lived, although she’d since moved. Meanwhile, next door was a radical Black separatist heroin dealer who had adopted the name Shabazz, and so far as we could tell the feds had no idea he was even there.
Shabazz eventually got caught boarding a plane with a gym bag full of guns, this being back in the days before TSA screening. But it wasn’t the feds who caught him. The flight attendants noticed his nervous behavior and summoned the airport police.
So that’s my solution to this terrorism crisis: Fewer cops, more flight attendants!
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