Who Do You Trust?

By Keith Schmitz
This is my sign-off post as well at Folkbum, and I want to thank Jay for loaning me his space for the past few weeks. This is not as easy as it looks and I did my best to make it seem that way.

I will be going back to pumping out newsletters to Grassroots Northshore. Hoping all of you who live in this part of town, especially those of you on the Milwaukee East side, will mosey over to www.grassrootsnorthshore.org and join the movement to lifestyle politics – making politics part of your lifestyle.

Now on to shoving this cow into the piranha pool.

God knows many of us hate to think this way. You know, every time this administration gets into trouble some terror alert hits the fan.

I tried to sit on my BS detector after Democratic voters in Connecticut urged the party to grab a back bone by voting down Joe Lieberman and going with the positive Lamont program.

Happened to be going to the airport early on Thursday when I saw the news on the Mitchell Terminal monitors about the liquid bomb plot. Considering where I was and what I was about to do, and the fact that the British pulled it off I was a) glad that another airline threat was snuffed out and b) I happened to have my gels and liquids in the checked luggage.

Driving through Texas later I heard on the radio the speculation about the administration in trouble =’s flip over the terror card in the case of the London plot. Tempting, I thought, but not plausible. I mean it appears the Bobbies and MI5 were the one's on top of this. At least no one in the US could lay claim to cracking the case.

Oh my naiveté. From NBC News…

A senior British official knowledgeable about the (terror plot) case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner.

I think this, ladies and gentlemen, blows up the 9/11 as inside job theory because immediately someone hisses out information to the press. The NBC post goes on to quote an unnamed US official:

Another U.S. official, however, acknowledges there was disagreement over timing. Analysts say that in recent years, American security officials have become edgier than the British in such cases because of missed opportunities leading up to 9/11.

Yeah, yeah the timing does match up with the Lieberman loss, but this might have been done just in case considering the drift of the polls. I suggest this as a possibility, not an absolute.

At any rate, lately what goes on in Washington reminds me of the name of the quiz show that launched Johnny Carson to fame – “Who Do You Trust?”