Monday, December 07, 2015

National id squawking

Okay, so we know Mr. Bad Hair can't go too far for some of our fellow citizens. He's our representative asshole. He's good at the part.

So I don't pay much attention to most of his squawks. But this one momentarily caught my attention.

Trump said he didn't believe the shooter's sister, Saira Khan, when she said she couldn't fathom how her brother Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik could've committed the mass shooting. "I probably don't believe the sister," Trump said. "I would go after a lot of people and find out whether or not they knew. ..."

Of course he doesn't believe Ms.Khan. She's apparently not an asshole. In fact, she's said one of the more wise things anyone has said about the San Bernardino massacre. From an interview at the New York Times:

... the sisters said they were baffled by what had happened. Their brother had seemed happy with his wife and 6-month-old baby, they said. Asked if she felt shame, Ms. Farook said: “I am not ashamed to be Muslim. I am not ashamed to be American either, and I am not ashamed to be Pakistani either. I think shame is for people who feel guilty about something.”

“We’re trying to be helpful with the investigation,” Ms. Farook said. “People want answers and we do as well.”

This part bears repeating: "... shame is for people who feel guilty about something." There's no shame in being who we are. Shame accrues for what we do. As far as anyone knows, Syed Farouk's sisters didn't do anything they should not have. They are among his victims. Kudos to the Times for the interview.
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And yes, we're all more than a little baffled. Whether our spooks can ever discern what was going on with the San Bernardino couple will be a great test of whether the NSA's universal internet dragnet is worthwhile. I'm not counting on it in.
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In another article, the Times buried what should be the lede in all discussions of terrorism.

... the massacre may presage a bitter new reality. “It’ll gradually dawn on people,” said Bruce Jones, a former United Nations official and the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, “that we’ll be living for a long time with the possibility of low-level attacks that can never be predicted and can rarely be prevented.”

Nobody likes this, but adults will get used to it. They can't destroy our country; we can only do that to ourselves.

5 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

It's funny how this works as we all get into our automobiles and drive somewhere but know someone might crash into us while they text or momentarily lose control of their vehicle. Our odds are far more likely that will happen than that a terrorist or someone mentally defective will choose where we shop to attack. Both are random and cannot be predicted. For some reason one inspires all kinds of rhetoric and the other we more or less ignore unless it's us or our loved ones.

Brandon said...

It's really very easy to disregard the man. A substantive candidate like Jill Stein has received not even a fraction of his press coverage.

Hattie said...

That is well put, Jan.

Civic Center said...

I'm still wondering how all the initial eyewitness reports of three white men in paramilitary outfits morphed into a Muslim man and a woman with a new baby, and why they would shoot up a social services office in San Bernardino. Nothing in this story makes even the remotest bit of sense.

janinsanfran said...

Mike: like you, I continue to feel we don't know quite what was going on in San Bernardino. I wonder whether we'll ever find out.