…about this being five years since you know what. Except this:

• I’ve only found a couple of reviews of the apparently silly, allegedly far-right-biased ABC 9/11 TV movie. As cheap publicity stunts go, the hype over the movie’s writer-embellished Clinton bashing seems to have brought more attention than the piece-O-tripe deserved.
• The right-wing sleaze machine still doesn’t want you to realize several things about the attack. Foremost among them: Al-Qeida has no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the United States government or imposing a strict Islamic regime on the U.S. citizenry. They’d like to install such regimes in Iraq, Somalia, the “Stans,” and Turkey; and they’d like Israel to disappear.
• The hijackers came not from Iraq but from “friendly” Saudi Arabia. You know, that country where the official religious poilce harass insufficiently-covered women, where a corrupt monarchy rules everything, and whose said monarchy’s big pals with Bush’s oil-piz pals.
• The real threats to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. democracy, and the U.S. way of life are internal, and they can all be traced to the right-wing sleaze machine. This is acknowledged by just about everybody who’s not directly or indirectly employed by the sleaze machine.
• As Nov. 2006 nears, and with it the potential end to total one-party control of the federal government, the sleaze machine will only get sleazier. Because fear-‘n-smear is all they know how to do anymore.
• But what if more of us stood up to the fear-mongering, not just in politics but in our daily lives and in the economy (too many of us, including many of us in the media biz, live in fear of being left behind by an increasingly inequitable economy, and thus become willing slaves to anything that will allow us a toehold into the “haves”).That’s the premise of Arianna Huffington’s newest book/web site, Becoming Fearless. Unfortunately, the site’s shackled by adherence to self-help publishing industry rules, including the rule that such material must be by/for/about women only.

  And what drives these media-biz rules? Strict commercialism, which at its bottom line is just another form of fear.