A Revelation
It’s been a while since I’ve posted to Sourapples (OK, about four months), and the shame of projects abandoned was putting distance between me and the blog I used to be so proud of. I thought I might never again have the courage to mount my online soapbox.
But lo and behold, last night I was given reason to return, thanks to my local news channel.
There, nestled in between the Black Friday consumer masturbation and the insufferable holiday football recap was a tiny little mention — couldn’t have been more than a couple sentences; I would have missed it if I had gone to open another beer — about the recent findings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
They concluded that in 2001, we had cornered Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, but he escaped because we shifted our strategic attention to the nascent Iraq war.
There it was. The naked truth. The most important geopolitical factoid of the last decade, revealed non-chalantly in an momentary evening news aside. An ‘I-told-you-so’ bombshell a thousand times more powerful than Republicans’ ‘the surge worked,’ went off in my living room. And it barely made a sound.
Yet before my jaw could hit the floor, they moved on to the football scores.
Tags: Iraq War, Osama bin Laden
November 30th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I saw this as well and it terrified, enraged, seriously depressed, and shocked me. Thank you for your post.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
If you actually capture the boogey-man, well, you can’t use him as the boogey-man anymore, can you?
If you’re upset because you think you’re being played by our “leaders,” either get used to being played or get used to being upset.
Powerful people have only one agenda and that is maintaining and growing their power. You can see it on a local level, e.g., work, but on a geopolitical level it is magnified beyond your comprehension. Millions of people can and will be sacrificed to maintain the power of a egomaniacal ruler. It’s the way of the world. Sorry.
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
factoid
• noun 1 an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. 2 N. Amer. a brief or trivial item of information.
http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/factoid?view=uk
Sorry. I had to.
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
I think I’m still safe within the second definition, since I’m from North America, and was using it to mean something close to ’snippet’ — I was trying to be funny.
Point taken though.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Great post. I guess football’s more important to the rest of the world. What a sad world we live in.
P.S. I think “factoid” was a fine word choice.