What would normally have been a very huge story, the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas last week which killed 15, injured 200 and basically blew half the town to kingdom come, was unceremoniously elbowed off the front pages by the Boston Marathon bombings.
While The Gadfly in no way minimizes the seriousness of the events in Boston, it does get The Gadfly to pondering. As it appears at this point that the Boston bombers where basically a couple of fucked in the mind morons who more or less blundered their way to capture after their cowardly deed, let's, for shits and grins, make an apples to oranges comparison here with these two huge newsworthy events.
On one hand you have an event, criminally perpetrated, that resulted in the deaths of 3 people, 250 more injured and some property damage to a handful of businesses. On the other hand you have an event, criminally perpetrated (will expound), that resulted in the deaths of 15 people, half of them first responders, 200+ injured, and nearly half of an entire residential community practically demolished (see accompanying photo at top of this post).
In the first event, the nation's media went in to Defcon 1 ballistic hyper-drive mode covering the Boston activities ad-nauseum from dusk to dawn and from every angle - except of course the angle containing any semblance of journalistic ethics. In the Texas event, now that information has been released reporting that the Texas fertilizer plant had not had a state safety inspection for nearly a decade and had been storing 1300 times more ammonium nitrate than what they were legally allowed to be storing, the media's attitude is "ho-hum" - no international terrorism (real or perceived) involved, therefore no importance.
As to the aforementioned pondering, it truly leaves The Gadfly confusedly wondering just who in the royal fuck the "real terrorists" are in these two sad stories.
----TFG
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