In an attempt to mirror the disproportionate response exhibited by Israel in the Lebanon invasion, the rightwing is now whipping itself into a rich creamy head of outrage froth over leftwingers! attacking Zionist entertainers!
I didn’t know Bernie Mac, Don Johnson, Serena Williams and Vivica Fox were Zionists?
Remember the story about this anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, anti-terror ad that was published in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday and signed by 84 Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls?
Well, now the “Zionists” are under attack!
And who is this brave blogger leading a letter writing attack against these Zionist bastards? Is it our Dark Lord Kos or Atrios: Bestower of Wankerhood? Maybe it’s Glenn Greenwald – The Man with Two Countries or Jane Hamsher and her Poodles of Doom ?
I confess, I just scanned the names on that incomprehensible ad and saw the usual tiny cadre of Hollywood rightwingers and a bunch of studio execs and wondered why the big conservo-kahuna wasn’t among them. Oops. I guess I know now, huh? My bad.
Oh well, I guess missing out on the big letter writing jihad will go down as just another missed opportunity for a godless liberal like me to offer aid and comfort to my muslim fundamentalist brothers. Maybe next time.
Wow. Here’s an interesting new way of framing the national security debate:
A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found “no evidence that terrorism is weighing heavily on voters — just 2 percent cite that as the issue they most want to hear candidates discuss, far fewer than the number mentioning education, gas prices, or health care.” The center continued: “And while roughly a third of Americans (35 percent) say they are very concerned that if Democrats gain control of Congress, they will weaken terrorist defenses, even more (46 percent) express great concern that Republicans will involve the U.S. in too many overseas military missions if the GOP keeps its congressional majorities.”
I know it’s hard to believe, but I just heard Morton Kondrake repeating that in very grave tones on The Beltway Boys while Fred Barnes fluttered about like the Madwoman of Chaillot babbling about polls being meaningless. It definitely hit a nerve.
It’s a good question. How many wars do the Republicans think we should be fighting? And should the people who got us into the useless, unnecessary cock-up in Iraq really be the ones to decide?
I wrote a little teaser in my last post about the Republicans’ “cunning plan” to deal with the inevitable reminders of their disasterous handling of Katrina. It’s actually not very cunning and certainly not original.
One word: macaca.
A reader reminded me of a post I wrote last September during the Katrina aftermath called “Dusting off the Manual.” In that post, I noted that TIME magazine was reporting the administration had a three point plan to come back after the debacle which included ginning up the base with tax cuts and votes on embryonic stem cells.
There’s one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it’s like a favorite old song — they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They’ll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.
On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the “underclass” can be traced to so many “out of wedlock births.” I think it’s pretty clear he wasn’t suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it’s all about that old racist boogeyman “dependency.” Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about “the welfare state.” He was in his element, getting his “we’re gonna take our cities block by block” Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren’t about class — although they will certainly claim that’s what they’re talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it’s affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.)
Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated “law ‘n order” strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime — and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It’s time to go back to what works.
For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he’s racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don’t kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.
The post went on to discuss at some length the history of race and its implications for politics after Katrina; if you are interested in such arid subjects you might enjoy reading it in full. But I think there are elements of the above observation that we are seeing manifested in what we see lately from Connecticut to Virginia: race baiting.
The master stroke is that the Republicans have managed to get Democratic useful idiots to do their dirty work for them. I was quite startled to see Lieberman use crude racist appeals in Connecticut. It seemed odd and out of place, particularly for Lieberman who has always leaned so heavily on his early involvement in the civil rights movement. It’s certainly not something Democrats have done in many years, even in primaries. But he ran with it hard in the last days of the campaign: his lobbyist friend Richard Goodstein screamed at Lamont at press events to say whether he was a “Sharpton” Democrat or a “Clinton” Democrat and Lieberman himself repeated the phrase. This plays right into Rove’s hands quite elegantly, Clinton being known as the “first black president” and all. Either Lieberman has internalized rightwing racebaiting tactics or he was being advised by his new GOP advisors before the end of the primary.
This was followed by useful idiot number two: Marty Peretz, who added Maxine Waters to the mix of reprehensible blacks who backed Ned Lamont. Again, I find it quite odd that the subtext of this Connecticut contest keeps coming up racial. Something is in the air and I don’t know if Lieberman and Peretz are just breathing it and don’t understand their own racist motivations or if they are literally taking Rove’s advice. What I do know is that they are playing the tune the Republicans want them to play. In the most watched race of the 2006 campaign, racial politics are front and center — and there are no GOP fingerprints anywhere near it. Sweet.
But this racist undercurrent is coming from several directions and serves several purposes. You’ll remember back in March the wingnuts put out some trash talk about impeachment in a naked ploy to intimidate Democrats into backing off a campaign built around holding the Republicans accountable. But there was more to it:
Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
[..]
Brian Jones, a Republican spokesman, said the e-mail messages generated a higher response than anything the party had sent in several months, including bulletins about the Supreme Court confirmations.
”Clearly on our side it is something that is energizing our base a little bit,” Mr. Jones said.
”This is not about getting things done,” he added. ”This is raw partisan politics.”
[…]
Mr. Weyrich, for his part, acknowledged that the prospect of impeachment seemed far-fetched at the moment. ”It looked bizarre, too, when Father Robert F. Drinan and a handful of others, such as John Conyers Jr. in 1972 similarly were planning for the impeachment of President Nixon,” he wrote in his newsletter. ”When the moment of truth came, they were ready.”
(I guess the impeachment of President Clinton has been disappeared from history…)
Brendan Nyhan noted at the time that the impeachment talk was absurd:
Does anyone actually think the House Democrats would impeach Bush on a narrow party-line vote knowing they will fail to convict in the Senate? Barring some sort of blockbuster revelation, this seems improbable. From Weyrich’s perspective, of course, the facts are immaterial; the point is to get the base motivated, and the prospect of a Speaker Pelosi-led impeachment might be quite effective.
This isn’t just about Pelosi, though (as much as they demonize her, as well.) This is also about the prospect of “certain” Democrats being in charge of important committees. And none other than Joe Klein was there to spell it all out for the cognoscenti and make it clear that the Republicans, as always, have a good point:
The inevitability of race as a subliminal issue in the campaign became obvious as I watched House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the personification of fluttery uncertainty, trying to defend Representative John Conyers on Meet the Press a few weeks ago… the ugly truth is that Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s, a group “more likely to cry ‘racism’ and ‘victimization’ than the new generation of black politicians,” a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me.
[…]
Rangel would be one of the most powerful Democrats in the new Congress, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is regarded as more mainstream than Conyers, well versed in tax and entitlement policies, but he has had an unfortunate tendency to shoot off his mouth in the past. He has questioned interracial adoption, and has compared colleagues who opposed tax breaks for minority broadcasters to Hitler. After Hurricane Katrina, Rangel compared Bush to Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses in the 1960s.
[…]
Conyers and Rangel are embarrassments, but there is nothing the Democrats can do about them — and they are certainly no more objectionable than any number of right-wing extremists who fester in Congress. But it’s not too late for Hastings to remove himself from the line of fire and make clear his support for Harman as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Conservative Dem Martin Frost wrote an article for Fox News the other day in which he did a rundown on all the incoming chairmen if Dems win a majority. It’s quite an impressive list. He ended his piece this way:
The sky may fall on the Republicans once this group becomes chairmen but it won’t be for racial or ideological reasons. It will be because they will know what to do from day one.
He knows very well what any close observer can see — they are already playing the race card.
Karl Rove and Joe Lieberman’s BFF, Marty Peretz, said it quite clearly: “I’m appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees.” After his repeated comments about race hustlers, I think it’s pretty clear what he’s getting at and it isn’t a problem with John Dingell. (The General sent Peretz a fine suggestion to bring back “Birth of a Nation” with a Toby Keith soundtrack to get the word out. I wonder if he’s heard back.)
And then there’s Senator George Felix “Macaca” Allen. He’s just a stone racist, but I think it’s worth noting nonetheless that he knew he could play the race card among his supporters in “the real world” of Virginia. You didn’t have to know what “macaca” meant to know what he was saying (and I would guess that more than a few of his supporters know very well what it meant.) His face in that video shows a barely leashed anger, the tight smile, the sarcastic edge — and his supporters all got the point, laughing and tittering at his nasty little aside. Nobody has asked what purpose it served for Allen to point out this guy videotaping the event in the first place. I assume Allen’s supporters thought he was with the campaign not with Webb, and even if they did I doubt they would have thought much about it. But Allen, either out of personal pique or political calculation (or both) brought this lone dark-skinned person to the attention of his audience and identified him with the opposition. He did that for a reason and I suspect it’s because the word has gone forth that race is on the table in this election. (The fact that he’s even more braindead than Bush is what did him in — he pulled it on a guy who was videotaping him. Jesus.)
This is happening because the Republicans are on the run and they have to pull out all the stops to GOTV. Mostly, however, I think it’s an attempt to neutralize Katrina. Let’s face it, there is nothing the Republicans can do to improve their image when it comes to their performance last September. It was a national disgrace and we are going to relive the whole awful scene in living color on the first anniversary. Their only hope is to stoke enough under-the-radar racial resentment to mitigate the damage. I suspect they have been thinking about this for the past year and carefully laying out all the little racist signposts we’ve been seeing over the past few months.
Katrina remains very damaging for Republicans unless they can find some way to kick in the racist lizard brain. They are very good at tickling the primitive, tribal side of human nature — in fact, that’s all they are good at. Subtly and not so subtly playing the race card is one of their specialties and I think it’s pretty much all they have left in their hand to play this time out. (Immigration is another racial card for this cycle although I think it’s really aimed at ’08.)
The question will be whether there are still enough of the old school racists left who will recoil at the idea of the uppity Conyers and Rangel in power. And it remains to be seen whether they can find a way to touch once again that deep, unexamined part of the American psyche that Katrina revealed — not hatred, but fear of African Americans. Fear, after all, is the GOP’s stock in trade.
I doubt it will work. I think we have come too far for racism of that kind to last beyond a single moment. It reared its hideous head briefly during the crisis but I don’t think Rove can bring it back with standard racist appeals. His problem is that it’s all he’s got.
Keep your eyes open, though, for signs of this phenomenon. It’s clear to me that this is the GOP subtext of the election. It’s quite amazing when you think about it. Bush ran as the Republican who was beyond racial politics, known for his outreach to Hispanics and African Americans. But when it comes down to it, racism is really the heart and soul of the modern Republican party, the essence of their electoral strategy and the underlying sentiment that drives their appeals to “tradition” and “religion.” We’ll see if they can crank up the old macaca machine and make it work for them one more time.
Update: in case anyone needs to be reminded of the kind of person who will be reached by these appeals, Sadly No! does a little down home fisking of one GOP stalwart.
It occurs to me that this election season is going to be characterized by two competing September pageants and whoever handles them most skillfully will have the edge in November.
We already know the Republicans are running on 9/11. They are undoubtedly gearing up for a five year anniversary commemoration in which the subtext, as always, will be portrayal of Republicans as being strong enough and tough enough to keep the country safe compared to the vacuous and naive Democratic ninnies.
The Republicans are counting on the fifth anniversary to remind people of Bush’s Bullhorn moment, which was sold as a moment of potent muscular leadership when in fact it was what he had been training for since his days on the sidelines at Andover prep:
We’ll see if the nation has finally seen through Karl Rove’s deft imagery to the callow little cheerleader that always lurked, like black and white pentimento, beneath the iconic picture.
That brings us to the other big pageant this fall. A few days before 9/11 we are going to memorialize another day of national horror: the death of a huge swathe of an American city, while the president and John McCain shared a few laughs over birthday cake:
Obviously the Democrats will shine the light on Katrina as the iconic example of Bush’s mismanagement but the question will be whether the white house can control the way the press reports it. My bet is the media will want to go back and show plenty of footage of themselves down in New Orleans. They were in the middle of the story for a few days reporting on the appalling conditions when the government seemed paralyzed. They are going to want to revisit their glory days.
They will also undoubtedly do a bunch of “where are they now” stories and investigations into what has happened in the past year. I believe it’s going to be very bad for the Republicans to be reminded of their lowest moment, just before the election.
But they are going to fight back, never fear, and they have a cunning plan. More on that in my next post…
Meanwhile, let’s not forget that the common denominator is all of this is Bush’s reflexive lying about everything:
Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared”.
WASHINGTON — In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage of the briefings.
Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”
Six days of footage and transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.
Linked by secure video, Bush’s bravado on Aug. 29 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.
He was leading a cheer, not leading the government, and that has always been the fatal misunderstanding of the man’s presidency.
The Haditha atrocity investigation is looking more and more like a funhouse mirror every day. TBOGG notices that the fine fellow who is suing John Murtha turns out to be suspiciously involved in the possible destruction of evidence in the case. And then there is this from ABB1, which is almost unbelievable:
August 18, Reuters:
Probe suggests Marines hid Haditha evidence: NYT … The defense officials were quoted as saying the report also found commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives, particularly in Haditha, where insurgent attacks were rampant, The New York Times said.
Lt. Gen. James Mattis, the new top Marine general in U.S. Central Command, is due to decide on whether charges are warranted, officials said this week.
Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded Marine expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the comments Tuesday during a panel discussion in San Diego, California.
“Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military members in the audience. “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.
“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”
One of ABB1’s comenters points out:
I see he took command on Monday, one day before Bush’s recent “why don’t Iraqis appreciate everything we’ve done for them?” meeting at the Pentagon.
This is just in keeping with Bush administration policy that all the most outrageous of his commanders and failed advisors must be promoted and commended. Why just this month the most illustrious of all military fuck-ups, General Geoffrey Miller, retired from the Army with a Distinguished Service Medal,”for exceptionally commendable service in a position of great responsibility.” Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings commemorated the event back on August 2.
I have written about him extensively over the years. His role was never adequately examined in the press. He was an artillery officer with no experience in interrogation who was called in to do some leg-breaking in Guantanamo when the former commandant refused to torture the prisoners. And when he showed himself to be sufficiently capable of overseeing a torture regime there he was sent to Abu Ghraib to show them how it was done. For some unknown reason, he kept leaving rotten apples in his wake everywhere he went.
I have a sneaking suspicion that General Mattis will find that bad apples are spoiling his bushel too. And nobody will think a thing about the fact that the guy who declared that “it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them” is ruling on a report that found “commanders had created a climate that minimized the importance of Iraqi lives.” That’s just SOP in Bushworld.
Update: Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings has a long post up about General Mattis based upon Thomas Ricks’ description of Mattis in Fiasco, which I haven’t read. It indicates that Mattis, at the very least, is a much more complicated figure than Miller and probably doesn’t deserved to be lumped in with him. His comments are strange and inexplicable coming from the man whom Hilzoy describes. I can’t account for it.
But the point still stands, I think. For instance, let’s take a look at General Jerry Boykin from the Carpetbagger Report:
How can we forget our good friend Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence? As you may recall, eyebrows were raised around the world when NBC discovered that Bush had asked a man to coordinate our military intelligence in the war on terror who also happened to be an anti-Muslim religious zealot.
Among Boykin’s more colorful remarks, which were delivered in uniform, included the notion that our enemy isn’t Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, but rather, “The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He’s called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan.” In explaining why terrorists hate us, Boykin said it’s because “we’re a Christian nation,” which will defeat our enemies “if we come against them in the name of Jesus.”
Boykin also recalled a Muslim soldier in Somalia who believed Allah would protect him in battle against the U.S. “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his,” Boykin said. “I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” When the Muslim soldier was eventually captured, Boykin claims to have told the man that he “underestimated our God.”
Boykin also routinely tells audiences that God, not the voters, chose President Bush: “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.”
The good news is that George Felix Allen’s attempt to have him promoted again has been stalled out by John Warner. But he’s still the Pentagon’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence. When he retires he too will undoubtedly receive accolades and commendation despite the fact that he was found guilty of violating military guidelines and is cleqly nutty as a fruitcake. They certainly have no problem keeping him in a vital intelligence role despite the fact that he thinks George W. Bush was ordained by God and I find that very disturbing.
I know everyone will be shocked to find out that the woman who was detained yesterday for having explosive make-up in her purse wasn’t actually a terrorist and her make-up wasn’t actually explosive:
CEREDO, W. Va. — A West Virginia airport terminal was evacuated yesterday after two bottles of liquid found in a woman’s carry-on luggage twice tested positive for explosives residue, a Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman said.
Chemical tests later turned up no explosives in the bottles, said Captain Jack Chambers, head of the State Police Special Operations unit. The airport was reopened after nearly 10 hours.
A machine that security checkpoint screeners use to test for explosives registered positive results for two containers, and a canine team also got a positive indication, said TSA spokeswoman Amy von Walter.
The TSA screening looks for a range of explosives residue, some of which can be found on common household items, said TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser.
Airport manager Larry Salyers said he was told the woman was a 28-year-old of Pakistani descent who had moved to Huntington, W. Va., from Jackson, Mich. No charges were filed against the woman, who was taken from the airport by federal authorities at 5 p.m., Salyers said.
The woman was very cooperative, officials said.
Does anyone but me find it slightly questionable that two separate tests misread this woman’s make-up as being explosive? I think perhaps someone was intent upon seeing things that weren’t there, don’t you? In the end, this particular incident was not such a big deal. This woman was inconvenienced but they did finally recognize the truth.
But the press made a huge deal out of this all day yesterday, particularly FOX news, performing their designated role in the Bush travelling terrorist salvation show. I wonder, though, if there was even one person in the country who believed for a minute that this was a terrorist plot? I doubt it.
According to the latest Pew Poll, people seem to be “watching” the show now rather than feeling a part of it:
The news that British officials had stopped a terrorist plot to blow up planes flying to the U.S. drew higher public attention than have most other terror-related news stories since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Fully 54% say they followed this news story very closely, compared with 48% who tracked last summer’s London bombings very closely, and 34% who paid close attention to the Madrid rail bombings in 2004.
The extensive public attention did not result in a spike in concern about terrorism, however. In interviews conducted after the story broke (Aug. 10-13), a quarter of respondents said that they were “very worried” that there will soon be another terrorist attack on the United States. By comparison, 17% of respondents interviewed on Aug. 9 before the announcement reported that level of concern.
I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.
Let’s not forget that this expert on the true nature of the world once asked the president of Brazil whether he, too, had black people in his country.
Which wouldn’t be endearingly human in a “hey, I’m a just folks all American ignoramus” kind of a way even if his administration, and he himself, hadn’t been entirely wrong about the danger from bin Laden, the presence of WMD in Iraq, and the cakewalk of Iraq. And Katrina. And so on, so on, so on.
This isn’t funny, ladies and gentlemen and you, too, Republicans. It truly is hard to believe someone so ignorant and/or cynical commands the the most powerful military the world has ever seen. And he will accept no restraints whatsoever on his desire to do whatever he wishes.
Iraqbodycount.net reports that more than forty thousand civilians have been killed since America launched its invasion. Dig into the database and you’ll get the gory details: civilians killed by 500 pound laser bombs; children riddled by machine gun fire; deaths by sectarian violence. It’s amazing the multiplicity of ways a civilian can die during an invasion. Recent newspaper reports in the US indicate almost 18,000 Iraqi civilian deaths in the first seven months of this year alone, including 3,500 in July. Ponder the numbers and weep.
It was only a few posts ago that our resident minder Jose commented: “The idea of freedom does not register with the Left.” Naturally, my reaction was, “The idea of genocide does not register with the Right.”
I was thinking about all this talk of zero tolerance for gel-filled bras on airplanes and the like when I turned on Rhandi Rhodes today and she was talking about this. I’d forgotten all about it:
August 12th, 2005, OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A University of Oklahoma student was released on $10,000 bail Thursday after appearing in federal court to be formally accused of a felony for allegedly bringing a small explosive device into Will Rogers World Airport.
Federal agents arrested Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr., 24, on Wednesday at a security checkpoint after a Transportation Security Administration employee noticed something suspicious in his carryon luggage as it went through an X-ray machine about 9:30 a.m., FBI spokesman Gary Johnson said.
The device was described in an FBI affidavit as a carbon dioxide cartridge filled with gunpowder that could be detonated when connected to a power source such as the batteries Dreyling had in his electric razor and in his cell phone, which were also in his carryon bag.
An FBI bomb technician concluded the device could detonate with sufficient force to cause serious injury.
Dreyling faces a federal charge of trying to get on an aircraft with an explosive device. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
He was released to the custody of his mother, Vicki Dreyling. His terms of release include living at his parents’ home in north Oklahoma City and a 10 p.m. curfew.
Dreyling appeared in federal court wearing an orange Oklahoma County jail jumpsuit and orange flip-flops. About twenty friends and family members attended the hearing in a show of support for Dreyling.
Former Oklahoma City Mayor Kirk Humphreys, who is Dreyling’s landlord and his longtime friend, also came to the hearing.
Humphreys said Dreyling had created a ”glorified firecracker” and then forgotten that it was in his luggage.
[…]
Dreyling told authorities that he had made the device and said it was ”basically a pipe bomb,” according to an affidavit. Dreyling said he built the device for entertainment value, never intending to hurt anyone, and forgot that it was in his carryon bag when he brought it to the airport, the affidavit said.
Dreyling said he learned as a teenager how to build homemade explosives from Web sites like ”The Anarchist’s Cook Book.” Dreyling said he has built and detonated several explosive devices for recreational purposes, according to the affidavit.
He also told authorities that he had a bag of gunpowder, an empty carbon dioxide cartridge, and several ignitors in his Norman residence, according to the affidavit.
”I know Charlie Dreyling quite well,” Humphreys said. ”I’ve known him since he was in the first grade. I appreciate what the authorities are doing making our airlines safe.
”I have every confidence that they’ll find out Charlie Dreyling is a fine young man and no terrorist.
”He had a little explosive device, and boys like to see things go bang. He took it down to an outing at the lake, left it in his bag, forgot it and went to the airport.”
His charges were reduced to a misdemeanor and he was let off with a fine. But then he is a good Republican white boy and shouldn’t have his life ruined over a little potential explosion on an airplane.
(Meanwhile, it’s getting to the point where everyone is going to have to fly naked. As Amato says, it gives new meaning to the phrase “snakes on a plane.”)
