Benign negligence?

It's not funny anymore. It was amusing, for a while, but I'm getting tired of it. I'm getting tired of politicians, intelligence "experts", talking heads, and newspaper columnists feigning confusion and bewilderment at how the intelligence community dropped the ball on this one.

All the pieces of the puzzle were available to them. They knew who this kid was. As I discussed yesterday, they knew he supposedly had terrorist tendencies. His own father contacted our government multiple times and warned us. He was on the watch list (but not the no fly list - of course, an unintentional bureaucratic SNAFU). He paid cash for a one-way ticket, and boarded without luggage. He might as well have tattooed "I have a bomb" on his forehead. Then consider that he was escorted past security by a mysterious man in a suit without a passport or ID of any kind, and was videotaped throughout the entire flight by another strange person. And now we know that this "isolated extremist" had at least one accomplice, who also had a bomb.

Yet no one in the establishment deigns to speculate that maybe our government, at the very least, allowed this attack to happen as justification for escalating the GWOT, distracting us from the grotesque "healthcare" legislation they're about to rape us with, and of course as an excuse to clamp down further on our liberties - the chorus is rising demanding millimeter wave scanners that see us all naked (and the government will comply). Nobody bothers to ask, how dare this government punish the American people for their own malfeasance? Their own negligence?

And of course don't dare ponder the possibility that this malfeasance, this negligence, was willful. My goodness, you can't go there. God forbid they open that can of worms, because then people start wondering if all these whacko conspiracy theories about 9-11 have some merit. Maybe people won't think the whole thing was a black op, but it won't seem so crazy to wonder if the government knew about it and allowed it to happen. Never let a good crisis go to waste, especially one you can manufacture. No, just sweep this under the rug, fire some people, send in Dick Cheney to attack Obama, accuse him of being weak on terror, give him an F, place all the blame at his feet. Let his poll numbers continue to drop. Blame liberals. Blame Muslims. Anything except what really happened, or even remotely close to what really happened.

Now, before you rip me for expecting honesty out of the establishment, I know this. I know they lie for sport. I know the media is bought and paid for, that there are journalists on the CIA payroll. I know. What's frightening about all of this is, obviously not al Qaeda, which is our own government; nor that our government stages terror attacks - it's actually comforting to be awake and aware and able to see when our government is pulling these black ops on us. It angers me, but at least I know I'm being lied to. At least I'm not duped.

No, what scares me is that the average American is so dumbed down, so distracted, so indoctrinated, that they themselves never even think to suspect a conspiracy on the part of anyone other than Muslim jihadists desperate to kill every last one of us. The thought is totally alien to them, that our government would even think of such a thing, much less actually do it. Such lack of scrutiny is akin to handing your teenage daughter a bottle of vodka, your credit card, and the keys to your Corvette. So, rather than actually think, they are now out for blood. They want Janet Napolitano's head. They want Obama's head. They want to carpet bomb the whole of Yemen, which, magically, is suddenly the headquarters of al Qaeda, not Afghanistan. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Or is it Eurasia?