You’ve probably heard that a sting operation caught three young men who allegedly planned terrorist activities to protest the NATO summit in Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the three “allegedly plotted to firebomb President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s North Side home, as well as police stations and squad cars.”
Whether the three are guilty or not I do not know. What’s fascinating to me is the way this little issue is being portrayed by bloggers.
At Firedoglake, we read:
The NLG [National Lawyers Guild] attorneys representing the arrestees have not been shown any police records on any “month-long investigation.†The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. Yet, the press get to see the records on arrestees so that the police can be sure people take the charges against the activists seriously and do not suspect police abuse or repression of activists. …
…It is important to recall that back in 2008, prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, eight activists were preemptively raided and ultimately charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.†The national security state has a script, and when it comes to “National Special Security Events,†they stick to that script pretty well.
So that’s one perspective, which I neither endorse nor dismiss. Certainly there is a long history of police-state tactics targeting demonstrators, especially around large conventions and summit meetings. There’s more than a whiff of entrapment in this story.
Of course, there’s also a long history of hot-headed young men who want to blow stuff up. I’m making no assumptions here.
Rightie bloggers have another view, which is that the three indeed are deranged terrorists working on behalf of the Occupy movement. Per the Sun-Times article, the three found each other through an Occupy Chicago housing board. In the simple world of James Hoft, that makes them “#Occupy NATO terrorists.”
Hoft doesn’t mention the three alleged terrorists were allegedly planning to bomb Obama campaign headquarters. However, commenters brilliantly deduced Chicago + terrorism = Bill Ayers (example).
The Breitbrats also forgot to mention that the alleged terrorists were going to firebomb Obama campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel’s home. But the commenters wasted no time in deciding that Obama himself was behind the plot:
Hold on to your butts. Ask yourself, “Why did they decide to have NATO in Chicago, anyway?” Ya all are gonna have a knee-jerk reaction to these kids. “Stupid hippies,” and i don’t disagree. They’re responsible, yes, yes, of course, but THEY ARE ALSO BEING PRODDED TO VIOLENCE AND PROTEST BY THE INVISIBLE HAND. Obama cannot have his revolution without division, chaos, and flame.
Just another way for the Obama admin to launder (our) money for his homeys in Chicago.
Here you get the best of both worlds — it’s police oppression creating false terrorists, and the Obama Administration is behind it:
So, now our federal government has given up on the muslim terrorists and are going to create fake domestic terrorists at home? And you’re right!!! Why even have this in Chicago in the first place? Have you ever heard of “FALSE FLAG?” Just wait… something crazy is going to happen and Obama is going to try to emerge as the HERO to give himself an election boost… The fix is in for this NATO Summit. I’m so sick of this crap! These people (the feds) are so predictable!
BTW, I find the video highly annoying. There’s nothing productive about yelling the “F” word at a police station.
The “get a brain, moran” award has to go to the commenters at Weasel Zippers. Here at least the blogger headlines the part about blowing up Obama headquarters, and the commenters still think Obama was behind it. Sample:
thank you barak insane obama,
mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
you and ayers are great leaders
teachers, or terrorist tactics
jackass
The Weasel Zippers crowd are not famous for eloquence. All the comments are pretty much on that level.
See also Cannonfire.
This will all read much better after it goes through the Fauxnewsalator and comes out something like:
Today, we ask the question: Has President Obama’s campaign profited from the firebomb plot in Chicago?
Never confuse their raw material with their finished product.
Does it ever occur to these morons, that if President Obama was even half of everything they feared, that they’d ALREADY have no guns, and be sitting in some detention center with their family and friends?
If there was such a thing as spontaneous combustion, the ‘stupid burns so bright’ in these people, that righties walking down city street and seeing an Obama headline, or sitting on their couches at home, tuning into FOX, that they’d be going off like bottle-rockets.
‘BAM!!! BAM!!!’
“Wtf was that?!?!”
“Nothing honey, the neighbors must have gotten home and turned on FOX.”
And Tea Party gatherings would make the July 4th fireworks look like wet firecrackers.
Thanks for the link to my site; looks like we were thinking very much along the same lines.
In an added note to my original post, I make the following request:
“Calling Alex Jones! We need a right-wing conspiracy theory to bring everything together. The theory should explain why Obama would direct a plot to blow up his own headquarters and why Obama would entrap the anarchists. The theory should explain why Obama would engineer the Occupy movement and why Obama would sic police thugs on the Occupiers.
“Coming up with a single theory for all of this contradictory activity will take enormous creativity. But I have faith in our nation’s paranoid class.”
Something bad happened.
Barack Obama is bad.
Therefore, it’s his fault.
Given their inability to spot the flaw in that argument, it’s a wonder the creatures who comment at Weasel Zippers are even able to work their keyboards. I wanted to say that a chimpanzee could be taught to recognize the fallacy there, but I’m not sure you’d even need a primate. A particularly intelligent octopus would do.
“Coming up with a single theory for all of this contradictory activity will take enormous creativity. But I have faith in our nation’s paranoid class.â€
That’s hilarious!
You can come and get their paranoia when you can pry it from their cold dead hands.
yoiks! My brain hurts just from trying to figure out what they think is going on. I mean, if those arrested were prodded to violence by Obama as a way of inciting the turmoil he would presumably need to promote whatever government crackdown/revolution they’re babbling about, wouldn’t it make more sense to NOT arrest them, and let them drop a few Molotov cocktails during the NATO summit? So, Obama is fostering these dopes, AND YET also entrapping and arresting them?
My, the Kenyan is subtle in his machinations.
No doubt the fact that these things APPEAR to be contradictory is all proof that they are, in fact, true. What better way to throw someone off the trail than by acting in a way that disproves the hypothesis?
Yet again, I find myself wondering it there could be found some way to harness the mind-bending paranoia of these people to generate electrical power… we could eliminate the need for coal burning power plants overnight!
The righties are making me paranoid as I cross into the territory of their insane rhetoric.
A sane person can’t even parse their syntax, let alone follow their “reasoning.” That Weasel Jerkz comment is one seriously awful haiku.
Joan,
Less like “Haiku,” and more like ‘Feck-u!’
If you want to know what these people really think, just look at what they accuse whoever their enemy-du-jour is. They accuse Obama of a false flag attack because that is what they would do. They cannot fathom anyone being “other” – such a thought is beyond what their belief system will tolerate.
Every lie they tell about whoever is a mirror held up to themselves, and declares in no uncertain terms who they are and what they believe of themselves.
And nary a one of them has any idea… Self-examination is another foreign concept that only liberals and hippies would do.
My goodness..this ought to win the award for most nut jobs in one piece ever. I just kept shaking my head thru the whole thing and asking myself “What is wrong with people?” This entire story has everything BUT sanity. I can almost see Stephan from SNL describing it “It has firebombs (maybe or maybe not), people trying to change the world one “f” bomb at a time(the word DOES help after all when said over and over after stubbing ones toe), NATO, rightie logic(yikes) and oh, just like any good insane story it has the black man pegged as the one behind it all”( after all I am sure he has TONS of time off from running the country and all to make shit like this up..all the universe needs to add is some magic underpants .
Bizarre.
After blaming Republicans, here’s more from Mann and Ornstein, in the WaPo, on how to fix our broken system.
I don’t agree with it all, but there’s some interesting things to chew on.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-to-end-partisan-politics-heres-what-wont-work–and-what-will/2012/05/17/gIQA5jqcWU_print.html
Where’s Fred Hiatt, that these two were able to get their pieces in the WaPo? Must be on vacation on some island with no access to newspapers, radio, TV, cable, dial-up, or WiFi.
Also, too, they have now guaranteed that they’ll never appear on another Sunday bloviation festival, or FOX, or CNN, either.
Look for their only appearances to be on PBS, NPR, and C-SPAN – maybe MSNBC, but not on ‘Cup o’ Schmoe’s’ show.