How long can you hold your breath?

Now that Osama bin Laden is pushing up guppies, all the polls say Americans are steeling themselves for some kind of retaliation from al Qaeda.

Which reveals Americans to be far savvier than I have at times given them credit for.

We’ve been edgy about a follow-up attack since 9/11. But now, when that attack comes, it will necessarily follow the killing of bin Laden, and a lot of people will try to conflate the two for their own political ends. I’m thinking mainly al Qeada and Fox News, working from opposite sides toward the same end, as usual.

The next batch of suicidal fuckwits (al Qaeda, not Fox) will definitely cite the bin Laden killing in their suicide videos, but we won’t be fooled. Their attack’s proximity to bin Laden’s death won’t be causal, it will at best give them bragging rights. “Hey, this one goes out to Allah, and my homie, Osama... uh, death to America.”

Whenever the next domestic atrocity occurs, it will be the attack that Bush, Rumsfeld et al warned us was coming for seven years, not an attack incited by Obama’s successful sanctioning of OBL. We’d be fools not to continue to be wary, but bigger fools to point fingers at anyone but the terrorists when the next assault inevitably comes.

To be perfectly fair, though, bin Laden’s killing is likely to move these clowns’ deadlines up.

Makes for damned nervous times.

So as usual, when the shit really hits the fan, I did what the majority of Americans do—I turned to Fox News. There were 9/11 ceremonies in D.C. and Ground Zero on Thursday. I could get the facts anywhere, but I could only get that giggly, high-fructose buzz of outrage, indignation and anti-administration spin from Fox News. How, I wondered, were they going to turn Obama’s high-profile anti-terror success into proof positive of his anti-American, Socialist, secret-Muslim agenda?

Eventually I’d seek out BBC America, the NY Times, CNN.com… you know, cooler heads. But nobody does crazy better than Fox, and these are crazy times we’re living in.

Sure enough, one of their incredible blonde Barbie® anchors had honest-to-God 9/11 hero Todd Beamer’s Dad on.

A lump rose in my throat…

…for just a second, until I had to use it to choke down my gorge instead, as Todd’s Dad started a lengthy harangue about Obama’s “excessive use of personal pronouns” when announcing the death of bin Laden, followed by a helping of disgruntled beefing that the media was giving Obama (never “the President”), too much credit, too. There was basically a thread running though all his remarks, and it was weirdly not about 9/11 or his son’s heroism. For instance, then he went on to fulminate about how finding bin Laden fell into Obama’s lap. He literally said, “What’s he going to do? Nothing?” Mr. Beamer, Sr., it turns out, is one hell of a swell fellow if you happen to hate the President as much as he does. His son was a bad-ass, but he’s just an ass. He’s such a no-goodnik* that the Fox News anchor was forced to play the devil’s advocate role for Obama!



Then they casually mentioned a fact which revealed why such a high-profile victim’s family-member had time on his hands that day… He was on Fox News because he’d turned down a Presidential invitation to the Manhattan 9/11 ceremonies. One class act.


The rest of Fox’s coverage of the 9/11 thing Thursday was equally as revealing. More footage—by far—of W with his megaphone from 10 years ago (not to be mistaken for the pix of W with his megaphone from his college cheerleader days) than of the current, Osama-killing President laying a wreath at the ceremony they would otherwise have been covering like bees on a honeycomb. And barely a mention of the snubbed invitation the White House extended to GW Bush to attend today’s ceremony, the final resolution of the signature event to which he tied his entire administration.

To be fair, the snub is probably all MSNBC is talking about, but I prefer reveling in my opponent’s hypocrisy than cringing at my own side’s.

The rest of Fox’s coverage was mostly dedicated to variations on nascent conspiracy theories involving why Obama won’t release the “Osama Death Pictures.”

Here’s my theory: Releasing the photos will only enflame passions even more in the Muslim world. Everybody—left, right, center—knows that. Obama also understands by now, thanks to the Birther nonsense, that no amount of evidence of bin Laden’s death will be enough to satisfy his most vocal domestic critics. And finally, something else everybody knows is that in this age of social media and Wikileaks, as sure as God made little green apples, those pictures will surface. I’d put money on even the “kill video” showing up at some point. As long as a copy of it exists, it will come to light eventually. And we know a copy exists.

So here’s what I think Obama is going to do. He’s taken the high ground and refused to release the photos. Excellent move. That way, when they get out—whether the administration leaks them or somebody else does—he’ll get to claim plausible deniability, and the proof-of-death that everybody from Glenn Beck to Bill Maher is calling for will be out there.

The death of bin Laden coming during this period of so-called “Arab Spring”—whenever I hear the term “Arab Spring,” I imagine a discount soap that makes the wearer smell like kerosene, sulfur and perspiration—will have repercussions we cannot imagine. It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine, if religious hard-liners scoop up the newly-vacated seats of power over there instead of the bright-eyed, idealistic young protesters, this Arab Spring could ultimately lead to a nuclear winter.

That’s what a careful study of world history has taught me. The only consistent trend-line that establishes itself is that people will regularly do crazy shit that will result in the deaths of untold numbers of innocents. Which brings us right back to where we are today.

Bin Laden’s history, dude. Your move!


* Downgraded from the original pejorative out of respect for his son’s bad-assitude.