I read about a South American country some time ago which had absolute freedom of the press. You could found your own paper and you could print anything you wanted about the brutal dictator in charge or the thievish thugs who served him. It was a model unto us all.Trouble was, literacy in that little banana republic was right at 10%, and most of those in complicity with the regime.

Anyone would allow a free press if it’s never read. Take those various commission reports they are so fond of in DC. They are bi-partisan (hermaphrodite) by nature, which means they are written by eunochs who will forever protect against any dallying with the message by unauthorized facts.

The mission is to protect the powers while seeming to be doing something for the voters. And so we have this tedious Iraq bi-partisan Vegas showboy review which nobody read and fewer remember which resulted in zero alterations in the course of war, but, boy, it sure did look like officious action at the time, which is all we can hope for. And then of course there was the 9-11 Commission report.

I want to take just one item from that travesty on transparency, the care and feeding of the Midland Midget on that fateful day. The basic facts are well-known: Dohbya hid under a CIA bed like a child with a nightmare for nigh-on a full twelve hours on this our most fateful day this millennia, leaving us without any leader, let alone a fearless one. The "real and credible" threats were concocted by the administration to explain the absence of the Commander in Chief. Even bootlicker conservatives were carping about his absence, and the PR team couldn’t very well report that the Crawford Cretin was in a catatonic state due to a bad case of buck fever, and he was no help in or out of emergencies anyway.

Let me excerpt a portion of the Commission findings for you. This from the notes of Section 10, Wartime.

All times are Eastern Daylight Time. Sometime around 10:30, after the decision had already been made not to return to Washington, a reported threat to "Angel" – the code word for Air Force One – was widely disseminated in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) and aboard Air Force One. Notes from the morning indicate that vice President Cheney informed President Bush in a phone conversation shortly after 10:30 that an anonymous threat had been phoned into the White House that was viewed as credible. At about the same time, news of the threat was conveyed on the air threat conference call.

The Secret Service’s Intelligence Division tracked down the origin of this threat and, during the day, determined that it had originated in a misunderstanding by a watch officer in the White House Situation Room. The director of the White House Situation Room that day disputes this account. But the Intelligence Division had the primary job of running down the story, and we found their witnesses on this point to be credible. During the afternoon of September 11 the leadership of the Secret Service was satisfied that the reported threat to "Angel" was unfounded.

At the White House press briefing on September 12, spokesperson Ari Fleischer described the threat to Air force One as ‘real and credible." Fleischer told us he cited the information in good faith. Indeed, Fleisher had conferred with Vice President Cheney and Karen Hughes before the briefing, and they had decided to let people know about the threat, all of them believing it was true. According to Fleischer, only weeks later did he learn – from press reports – that the threat was unfounded.We have not found any evidence that contradicts his account.

They have the SS Intelligence Division reporting the threat originating from the White House Situation Room. This is denied by the officer in charge of that operation. And yet the eunochs declare they find the SS witnesses to be "credible." Which means the Situation Room chief is a liar. But we don’t have any way on earth to judge just how the eunochs came to this very interesting decision.

The prime liar for the regime at this time was Fleisher, and he went before the White House Press Corps the day after the attacks (and the day after the White House knew the threats were bogus) and proclaimed over and over that the threats to Air Force One and the puppet aboard it were "real and credible." (The transcript from this session is no longer online, and I have copied it down elsewhere and it isn’t available as we go to press.) The reporters question him as to the nature of the threat, and he won’t answer. Top secret, you know. But the threats were "real and credible." This round robbin goes on and on and is never resolved.

Here’s what we do know. Howdy Doody is all three of Dorothy’s companions wrapped into one. He is a mindless scarecrow, a heartless tin man, and lyin’ while utterly lacking in courage. Also. it is pretty obvious, even using as a source the report in question, that he is excess personnel in his own administration. There were phone calls going every way to sundown and only chatting from the boy in the bunker. The eunochs state that the requirement was the the President delegate to the Secretary of Defense. Well, Howdy did speak with that individual, for about fifteen minutes, and neither recalls what was said.

If a fire broke out on the set of the original kid’s puppet show in the fifties, we can presume it would be handled just as this one was. They would fold Howdy into his box and place him under the bed, and then Buffalo Bob and Clarabell would rush about trying to douse the flames.

And so the Midland Midget went on to declare himself a "war president" (I hear "warp resident") and strut in his little flight suit aboard the US Lincoln off the treacherous waters of Long Beach, but a better picture of his true stature is in the arrangements for his testimony before the Commission. Like the original Howdy, he could not go onstage alone. He sat in the lap of his own Buffalo Bob.

A couple of discussions on Howdy’s exciting day begin here, and continue here, and another one is here.