Skip to main content

Upside Down

By
If I was a conspiracy theorist I would be jumping all over this track attack in New York City.  The timing couldn't be more suspicious -- one day after two indictments were handed down to Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and an associate of his, Rick Gates.  It's long been known that Manafort had ties to Russia, notably in advising former Ukranian President Yanukovych, who was supported by the Kremlin.  In fact, it was this money trail that tipped off investigators, as Manafort never reported the millions he had received in payments from Yanukovych as an "image consultant."  

Not that they come as much of a surprise, but the indictments have put a lot of unwanted attention on the White House and what better than to create a little diversion to get persons to look the other way again.  Trump was quick to tweet on the truck attack,


It's like something ripped out of the script of last season's Homeland, where a similar truck attack was used to turn attention on unwanted Muslim immigrants living in America.  Eventually, the truck attack was linked to a shady set of ties between rogue CIA operatives and a right-wing radio host.  Interestingly enough, the series also delved into the use of trolls and bots to spread fake news stories through social media, very much like what Russia is being accused of in this past election.

Who is to say who ordered this truck attack.  I'm sure ISIS will take credit for it soon enough, but then they also took credit for the Las Vegas shooting, claiming they had "flipped" Paddock.  More likely, the attacks were motivated by events closer to home, and if I want to play armchair conspiracy theorist, orchestrated by some "sick and deranged" right-wing news editor like Stephen Bannon, hoping to deflect attention away from the ongoing investigations, now that it has hit close to home.

Bannon is certainly capable of anything, including providing a conduit for Russian news sites to funnel their fake stories through American social media.  Not that they would have needed much help, since RT, or Russia Today, already has an enormous audience worldwide.  Still, the aim was to direct these "news stories" to specific viewing audiences and Bannon would have been the man to do this.

What I also find odd about many of these terrorists is that they hail from former Soviet states like Uzbekistan or repressed Russian provinces like Chechnya.  It seems that Russia not only funnels fake news stories but also terrorists abroad to help shake things up in the Western world.  I suppose they see this as a form of payback for the sanctions the West has leveled on Russia.



So, we have this guy sitting in Paterson, NJ, just waiting for a call and it comes on Monday.  There's a truck waiting for you at Home Depot in your name, pick it up and see how many persons you can take out on a busy street or bike path in New York.  Who knows where the call came from or if he got some message via the Internet.  Completely untrackable, so he will go down as just another "sick and deranged person" who happened to be of Muslim descent with an ax to grind.  Trump wasted no time assigning blame for the attack, hatching his own conspiracy theory thanks to his "friends" at Fox.  By the end of the week few persons will be talking about the indictments that were handed down on Monday.

This is the cynical world we live in where fact and fiction have become interchangeable and can be easily manipulated through television and the social media.  I would like to think that Robert Mueller is up to the task of sorting all this out, but he is "old school," and those rules no longer apply in a world that now seems "upside down."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more