Late Afternoonish/Early Eveningish Open Thread

From bin Laden’s point of view, the whole situation had to be immensely frustrating. He pulls off the crime of the century, of the millennium perhaps, and the victim America turns out to be so wrapped up on its own intramural bullshit that it can’t even give him credit for it. America turned out to be, in a way, psychologically immune to attack; its government was too corrupt to fight back, and its people were too crazy to comprehend their position in the world. We were a nation gone completely mad, blind to everything outside our borders, with our effective institutions co-opted by crooks and thieves and our citizens piddling away the last days of their influence reading sacred tracts and spinning absurd theories about the grassy knoll, WTC7, and the international Masonic conspiracy.

--Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, due for release May 6, 2008

Thread yourselves some open discussion.