Anyone agree with this?

When historians recollect the first decade of the 21st Century in tranquility, they will find it impossible to overstate the political impact of America’s most conveniently unsolved crime. The September 11, 2001 massacres were bad, but it was the anthrax attacks the following month that ramped up the “madness” Atrios recollected the other day. 9/11 was a shock. The anthrax attacks made terrorism feel like a siege. I think it’s possible that, absent the anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration might have failed to gin up the entirely equivocal support for the Iraq War that it managed.

That’s my bold and Henley’s italics, FWIW.

I didn’t think that way. I sure don’t remember it that way. It was probably different in the locus of the attacks (mostly WDC, as Jim is.) The anthrax attacks never felt like anything more than a very inefficient follow-up/follow-on to me, no matter how much play they got in the (targeted) news media. The bottom line was that an anthrax letter would kill a very few people, and they would be very targeted people. Big Wheels. People That Matter. People who might be logically thought to be capital-I Important to someone not terribly familiar with how this country operates. No matter who they killed, no matter how targeted, and how successful that targeting was, it wouldn’t be enough to kill the country. Suicide 747s were another matter, entirely…a vastly indiscriminate bomb. Practically nuclear.

Anthrax, not in a letter but in a crop duster, on the other hand, is the same thing. So, yeah, I’d like to know how allegedly militarized anthrax got into envelopes. I don’t think it’s convenient that it’s unsolved, though. I think it’s unsolved because it’s a difficult case that involves criminals who are adept at covering their tracks. To a simpleton like me, that has shades of state actors, but like I say, I’m a simpleton.

As far as some supposed madness, well…again, I cite locality. Lots of stupid shit happened in the centers of power five years ago, and it wasn’t exclusively a Republican or conservative or Red State Jesusland phenomenon. Since I’m a believer, I’m looking forward to my gaining of understanding of what, exactly, were the wrong, stupid moves.