There have been only a few really remarkable eras in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Depression, the World Wars, the McCarthy Era, and the 1960's.
Look around and remember what you see. I would bet the farm that this era will some day be remembered as the era of the worst presidential administration in 100 years.
John Ashcroft, Attorney-General of the United States, has announced many, many arrests of people he claims are terrorists. If you check into these stories, you will find that most--if not all-- of these arrests are actually of individuals who are guilty of nothing more than being suspiciously Arabic.
But lo and behold, the top law enforcement officer of the United States of America has finally arrested a bona fide terrorist, a man with actual bombs, guns, remote-controlled detonators, and a load of cyanide. Yes, John Ashcroft has finally caught himself an actual living, breathing, sweating terrorist.
And you aren't going to hear much about it.
Why? Because the terrorist's name is William Krar. Not Arabic at all. And he is no associate of Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Krar is a good old-fashioned all-American White Supremacist. Where's the fun in that?
Doesn't fit the official White House narrative does it? Doesn't play well to the heart-land, does it, which sometimes holds to it's bruised bosom the heartless souls of patriots like Timothy McVeigh, who may have gone a little astray, but, after all, grasped the essential dialectic of our time. No no no-- America's enemies are out there, they are not us, they don't look like us. There are persistent rumors that a "olive-skinned" man was seen in the Ryder Truck with McVeigh the day of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Now Krar and his cyanide.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times reports that an FBI spokesman asked an industry group for help dealing with the top domestic threats today: eco-terrorists and animal rights activists. Stirring, isn't it? Osama Bin Laden and Heather Graham at the same fund-raiser.
It's spin. You don't hear about Krar because the Bush administration needs you to believe that we need to spend $200 billion demolishing a two-bit dictator in Iraq to feel safe. The Bush Administration doesn't want you to believe that you might end up being safer if a well-managed domestic police force was doing it's job properly instead of chasing illegal immigrants or pot-smokers.
Krugman also reports that John Ashcroft is using every government data base available to search for terrorists. Every data base except one: the one that contains information about people who applied for gun permits.
To use that information, Ashcroft believes, would be to violate Americans' civil rights.
If you've stopped laughing by now at the idea that John Ashcroft cares about anybody's civil rights, read on: it is utterly amazing that the press has little or no curiosity about these stories. It's waiting for signs that Bush will lose the election, before lining up their potshots.
Then we will hear how they had always known that Ashcroft was just a little over the top.