21 October, 2006
Lie vs. Lie
Out of boredom, a 20-year-old grocery clerk does something completely idiotic and makes up a story about a dirty bomb attack to take place at several National Football League stadiums this weekend. The hoax rattled some nerves (including mine, given my proximity to one of the stadiums to have been included in the attack) and probably caused a lot of stadium and emergency crews and law enforcement to review security procedures, but no one was injured. For posting his radiological "dirty bomb" hoax on several Web sites, Jake Brahm is facing prison time.
I'm all for punishing Mr. Brahm. What he did was so unbelievably irresponsible, he should be made to pay for his stupidity (for starters, he should not be allowed anywhere near a computer with an internet connection for a very, very long time).
But how can this country collectively shake its fist at Jake Brahm and threaten him with five years in prison, yet allow George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, etc. to remain free? Their WMD hoax scared millions of Americans into supporting an illegal war, has created civil war in Iraq, cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, destabilized the Middle East, cost the United States billions of dollars, caused thousands of military families to have to subsist on food stamps and charity aid, destroyed our credibility around the world, made our citizens targets for anything from ridicule to kidnapping and murder, and I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
Has our society really divorced itself so completely from the concept of RIGHT and WRONG that we think putting someone in prison for being breathtakingly stupid is "justice", while we allow those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the looting of the US Treasury, und so weiter, to continue to perpetrate their crimes?
Technorati Tags: iraq, BushCo., war
~~ victoria on 10:00 AM ~~ 2 comments
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It cannot be sometimess wrong to shout "mushroom cloud!" needlessly, where those who shout it must endure years in jail to reconsider their crime, while it's also sometimes perfectly acceptable to do so, where we reward such behavior with gifts of unspeakable wealth and power. That's just horseshit.
By
Gary, at
10:02 PM
Horseshit. That pretty much sums up the entire Bush regime, donnit?
By
victoria, at
9:06 PM