On the front page of today's New York Times, above the fold, you get this article, which is more or less empty fluff.
Today on Making Light -- on the very same topic -- you get this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, which has some actual, honest-to-God reporting (from other newspapers, and elsewhere) with some terrifying analysis.
Now, I don't really know if the implications of Nielsen Hayden's horrifying speculations are true -- and, clearly, neither does she, as she'd probably be the first to admit. All she can do (not being a professional reporter with the resources and time that go with that) is identify a truly terrifying pattern. We need someone whose job is reporting -- who has, say, the resources of a national newspaper backing them up -- to investigate the possibility. (And, true or false, the result would be a real news article.)
I hope the conspiratorial implications of Nielsen Hayden's post are false. But assuming they are, given the actions of this administration in politicizing the government and turning every branch into banana-republic style corruption vehicles, would be foolish in the extreme. So someone needs to find out.
If only we had a functioning national media (and not the vehicles of partisan censorship we actually have.)
If you want to look at the truly terrifying -- more terrifying than I care to admit, really -- possibilities, click through to Nielsen Hayden's piece.
Otherwise, have some bread, and enjoy the circuses. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: just hope he doesn't have a gun.
2 comments:
All I did was read the comment thread. It's full of people who read the original news story and posted, "Hey, the exact same thing happened when I went to see Obama speak in [other location]."
My basic analysis was:
1. You can't get into a garden show or a Barry Manilow concert without going through more security checks than they're running at major campaign appearances.
2. If the same thing is happening at every campaign appearance, that's what they're planning to have happen.
3. The Secret Service used to provide better security than that. In fact, any professional security firm can provide better security than that.
I'm strongly averse to conspiracy theories, but there are darn few reasons for an organization full of top-notch security specialists to be running operations that are guaranteed not to work.
All I did was read the comment thread.
Yeah, but it turns out that that is a higher level of journalism than the so-called Newspaper of Record can manage.
All I'm saying is, if a blogger with other full-time jobs can read this & make this analysis, imagine what a full-time reporter who actually did their damn job could do. Even if they found some reasonable explanation for the very suspicious analysis listed above... providing it would be more interesting than what was actually published. On the front page. Above the fold.
SF
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