Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Townhall's Douglas MacKinnon Is Scared, Crazy:
In the realms of bugfuck insanity in the right-wing punditry, there's few that have come close to the taint self-licking paranoia and outright shitting oneself in public that Douglas MacKinnon's column achieved last week at Townhall.com (motto: "Proudly shitting ourselves in public for nearly a decade"). Titled "The Two Things You Need to Know Before Your City Is Nuked by Terrorists," MacKinnon lowers the bar on what passes for commentary to a level not even worms could squirm under. After speaking to a "former high level intelligence operative of our government" (which is broad enough to include both George Tenet and a spook who staked out Marshall Tito back in the day), MacKinnon is convinced, goddamn convinced that "Tragically, horrifyingly, but quite predictably, it’s going to happen. The only question being which American city or cities?"

Yep, that's the first things you need to know: that, like a first strike by the Soviet Union in the 1950s we all remember, it's going to happen. And why is that so? Well, when MacKinnon, not a willing tool, asked the former official that question, "his anger boiled out." Oooh, what's it gonna be? The Iraq war diverting our military and intelligence capacity from actually, you know, preventing such a thing from happening? Oh, no, little realist. Buckle your seatbelts and behold the rage of an old spy looking on our failed nation: "He pointed the finger squarely at our politicians and our politically correct, left-leaning media, who, in his opinion, have 'sealed our fate.' He spoke of politicians from both sides of the aisle who consider border security nothing more than a cheap tool to be used for their reelection and enrichment. He despaired about a media that not only gleefully leaks our nation’s most trusted secrets for partisan gain, but then willingly acts as a propaganda tool for the very terrorists intent on our total destruction."

God, how we've damned ourselves. Dear God, how Wolf Blitzer has failed us all.

But what to do? MacKinnon's advice is something not unakin to "Kiss your ass good-bye": "When said attack comes, you and your family are on your own. Period. My friend stressed that 'our government won’t be there to help us. It is broken beyond repair and incapable of assisting those most affected by the blast.' He talked of critical infrastructures like water, electricity, fuel, banks, our food supply, medical services, police and firefighters, being unavailable for weeks or months. He warned of the blind panic that would follow such an explosion. Of the looting, of neighbor turning on neighbor to take what they don’t have for their own survival. Of our economy suffering an economic loss in the trillions of dollars."

Man, we haven't seen craziness like this since before the Berlin Wall fell. MacKinnon may as well be taking out Joseph McCarthy's skull, sneering at it, calling the dead Senator a "pussy" before fucking its eyehole. This is the kind of nutzoid shit that all those conservative Chicken Littles have been praying for since the end of the Soviet Union so they can dust off their whips of nuclear holocaust and smack all our complacent asses with them. No wonder they want another 9/11. It'll give 'em a chance to say, "Told you so" to the hoped-for thousands of dead and injured people.

MacKinnon confronts us all at the end with these oh-so stark questions: " Knowing this, are you prepared? Can you and your family ride out the frighteningly unpredictable weeks or months following the loss of an American city and its inhabitants? If you are not in the city hit, can you survive?" Well, can you, motherfucker?

Maybe the answer is found in MacKinnon's recent novel, America's Last Days, wherein "A conservative president, say President Bush, is getting ready to be replaced by a liberal, say Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, after a crisis like something worse than 9/11. The nation's national security team is worried that the nation is going to pot." Man, a terrorist attack would send his sales through the roof.