Paging Wyatt Earp

By Number Six

Saturday, July 01, 2006 at 05:21 AM

Here's a killer piece in Newsweek about how the truth about a rag-tag group became a Bush urban legend....

Of course, Michael Moore pointed a lot of this out in one of his works, suggesting that the facts were being used to create a superb "scare factor" to intimidate us all into believing LOOK BEHIND YOU! THERE'S AL QAEDA!!

The truth, according to many, and this piece as well, depicts this bunch as, well, dangerous, of course, but come on, some of their operatives are no geniuses. The way our dear and fearless leaders depict them, we're staring down the whole Klingon Empire...when we're really staring down the Ike Clanton gang.

News like this makes me wonder: Some persons on their pages and blogs suggest, of course, Al Qaeda is like Roswell, UFO's...a big fairy tale. I don't go that far, Osama bin Laden is a dangerous asswipe, yes, he is real, yes, but...

Some U.S. officials are disputing Suskind's account. But it is true that the more we learn about Al Qaeda, the more we have to conclude that the group contained a lot more Abu Zubaydah types than it did Muhammad Attas. In contrast to the truly terrifying Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, and 9/11 master strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--both of whom took terrorism to new levels of competence--most Al Qaeda operatives look more like life's losers, the kind who in a Western culture would join street gangs or become a petty criminals but who in the jihadi world could lose themselves in a "great cause," making some sense of their pinched, useless lives. Like Richard Reid, who tried to set his shoelace on fire. Or Ahmed Ressam, who bolted in a panic from his car at the U.S. border during an alleged mission to bomb the L.A. airport. Or Iyman Faris, who comically believed he could bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. Or the crazed Zacarias Moussaoui, who was disowned even by bin Laden. Then you've got the hapless Lackawanna Six, and, more recently, the Toronto 17, who were thinking about pulling off an Oklahoma City-style attack with ammonium nitrate--or perhaps just beheading the prime minister--but hadn't quite gotten around to it.

Meaning, for every Moe, we get a dozen Shemps. Meaning, for every Ike Clanton, we get a bunch of drunk bad boys. For every bin Laden, quite a few Moussaouis, eh?

As suggested, compare this piece to the constant tintinbulation of stuff pouring over the MSM, from the RNC, from The White Slum. You follow their "legend" stories, well, Al Qaeda is then something akin to the fictional S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Ian Fleming's mind.

And the truth? Al Qaeda is really more like The Ike Clanton Gang, oh, they're dangerous as hell, yes, but, they also come armed with aplentiful of wannabee's, incompetents, and total morons in their ranks. Sure, Atta was a great pilot. Compare him to that dipwit shoebomber, eh?

And you'd just think: Gee, now with that sort of thing to deal with, wouldn't taking them out be, well, pretty easy?

No, because we do not have a Marshall Earp these days, to go and seize these buttheads and lock them up or trade lead. Instead, we have the ironic perfect match for Al Qaeda: The Bush Keystone Kops, who can't find their collective asses with either hand, but can sure waste billions...and humans...to put on a...um...well, a good show it is not. We can sure as hell bomb Iraq, but Ike bin Laden? Still free, still stirring the fires...

And no Wyatt Earp to go and seize him.