Sorry, I've been a bit scattered this week.
A friend recommended that I listen to Al Franken on the radio and I finally got around to doing just that. Oh my.
I am amazed, they reported a story today that I didn't realize was even a story any more. I thought it was common knowledge. I guess that's what I get for living in the liberal center of the universe when it all happened.
On Sept. 11, yes, that Sept 11, all the air traffic in America was shut down for several days. You remember it, I remember it, it was a very scary time. But there were a couple of chartered planes (first reported as one 737) making a few evacuations over those next couple of days.
Members of the bin Laden family, not the man we've all come to recognize as the great satan in our war against terrorism, but his family members – uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. – who were in our country in the normal course of business were all evacuated by charter jet. Remember, these people have a lot of money, we've been giving it to them by the hundreds of millions of dollars for years to keep our SUVs running. So they have some pull with our administration and were able to get a couple of jets in the air to evacuate their people before the backlash could start.
While I don't blame them at all, there are so many things wrong with this scenario I don't even know where to begin. It's just proof that people with more money than most countries can get away with stuff that ordinary people couldn't dream of.
This was reported in the news where I lived when it happend. I just thought it was something that was done and had forgotten about it. It was such a non-event compared to what had just happened in NYC that it didn't even make a footnote.
Jump ahead a few years: June 2004. Now it looks like it is becoming a huge scandal. What? According to what I heard on the radio this morning, the Administration is denying that it happened, and the air traffic controllers in Florida are insisting that it did happen.
So the question becomes, who do we believe? Do we believe my memory and the news casters in San Francisco's liberal media? My memory has proven to have selective holes in it in the past, but it's never been accused of fabrications. Do we believe the air traffic controllers in Florida? Who knows. I don't personally know any of them. But they do keep logs, don't they? Do we believe the Administration? They're politicians. They toss phrases around like "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Axis of Evil" and "Change the constitution to deny rights to a class of Americans" (the paraphrasing in that one is mine, regarding the proposed constitutional amendment to ban Same Gender Marriage).
Well, in case you don't really know me, let me set the record straight: I choose to trust my memory, and the working class stiffs who don't really have anything to gain by reporting this stuff (unless, of course, they want to discredit the President which is always a posibility.) I don't understand why the Administration categorically denies everything, but I guess they have their reasons.
