Homeland Security had never been an effective deterent against terrorists. It was nothing more than an expensive and elaborate ruse, used by the Bush administration to hide its own organizational impotency. It was a joke; security experts routinely got through airports with weapons; one man even got past Homeland Security's own security with a fake I.D. But the Bush administration, desperate to make the American public believe it was being "protected", poured billions of taxpayer dollars into its hapless shell game, gambling on the thread-bare hope that terrorists wouldn't strike again during the Bush administration's incumbency.
Every time an attempt to breach security was foiled, the Bush administration's press corps made sure it was national news. The bloated, lazy, sissified media was always much more content to use prepared news releases or copy down information from a hastily-called press conference. It was so much more "cost-effective" to take the government's news verbatim instead of going to the expense and trouble of digging deeper into the information. Fox News, CNN, and even the "big three" networks had allowed themselves to be lulled into a desolate sloth. Days of intensive investigations and in-depth reports had been quelled by the beancounters who ran the news departments for maximum profitability. The Fourth Estate was no longer the protector of one of America's basic freedoms: over the past several administrations, it had gradually allowed itself to wallow in a comfortable laxity, content to be a partner in government's sordid shams against the people. Newspaper reporters only reported what the government press release said, seldom going above and beyond. Questions, if they were asked, did not challenge authority; questions were only asked for the sake of appearance and as a matter of form. If a reporter got too "out of hand" (s)he was ostracized, and media executives were reprimanded by government executives for crossing that invisible line - that unwritten law - of cooperative interaction between the press and the feds.
So the media was aware of Homeland Security's limp efforts. The media was aware of how nothing was being done to protect the railroad stations, the thousands of miles of open borders, bus terminals, open ports, and an easily-accessible, crumbling American infrastructure. Everyone knew these vulnerabilities existed; everyone, that is, except the American people. Why should Anna Nicole Smith concern herself with all that tripe? She was busy trying to bag billions from a husband whom she'd promised to love "until death do us part". While she gleefully accepted the fact that her husband's death had, indeed, parted them forever, she was less receptive to the fact that she might be parted from all the money his corpse left behind. Even the United States Supreme Court shared some of Smith spotlight, a tragic parody on what's most important to our society. Eileen Dover, a housewife in Montclair, New York, couldn't be concerned with politics or Homeland Security. Her days were already full, reading all of the People magazine reports about Anna Nicole, watching Smith's every flirtation in front of the TV cameras, and chatting on Smith's Internet hotline with other devoted, demented fans. Eileen's husband, Ben, had threatened to leave her, but to no avail. She was part of America's obsession with celebrity, just another way politicians kept a majority of the American population distracted from what they've been doing to destroy ths country over the past six or seven decades.
Most of the country's leaders were dead. Even months after the extraordinary series of bombings, bodies were being dragged from underneath mountains of twisted steel and glass. The federal government was nothing more than a rag-tag group of bedraggled, awestruck individuals who had no rudder; most of the bureaucrats, politicians, and government aids who had not been murdered had no clue as to what to do next. State and local authorities began dealing with their own geographical circumstances while virtually all federal domination came to a standstill.
Still, there were some attempts being made to try and answer the questions still eating at most Americans: "How could this have happened...and why?" Televised reports were, at best, sporadic because there were few broadcasting facilities still in operation. A patchwork of "leaks" seemed to be coming from "unoffical, unidentified sources" on the "condition of anonymity" - a tactic that the Bush administration had use very effectively since 2000. Was this the work of international terrorists? Could it have been executed by a relatively low number of so-called militia groups who hated the federal government and despised the Bush administration's police state? Across the country, a stench of death permeated the air....but there was also the distinct implication that whoever had caused this to happen had a specific purpose: the masterminds of this carnage had, either intentionally or unwittingly, severely impaired the odius grind of grimey politics, the lurid lust for power, and the gratuitous grasp for corporate greed. Soon, a new 'source of information' would come forward with documented facts about how and why Americans had lost vitually all of their "honorable" leaders in one fell swoop of devastating wreckage. -RKO-