With the Toledo boys indicted, with the Lackawanna lads in the can for safekeeping, with a growing number of Islamist charities shut down, and with america up to its ears in war, the US Department of Justice is now going after the dreaded and scofflaw infected online music industry with a major look see aimed at the major players in the burgeoning enterprise, where the subpoenas are said to be falling like this winter's snow in the High Sierras.
and, not to be outdone, the energizer bunny of the law enforcement industry, the sultan of SWaT, the terror of Wall Street, the hellhound of Tammany Hall, the man who has run more rustlers to ground than the Earp brothers, the bloodhound nipping at the heels of shady corporate hucksters everywhere, the man who perfected the perp walk, the man who has occupied more pages in the Wall Street Journal than alan Greenspan, the naughtiest of all the players in the good cop/bad cop routines, Elliott Spitzer, has also begun a parallel investigation into the cost of music downloads - with kids and college, you have to watch where every dollar goes - and the corresponding horror of payola found in the radio studios, which dot the soft underbelly of our naked prostrate land. Graft is said to be infecting the music that america hears like the distortions experienced when a bucket of earwigs is dumped on an unsuspecting sleeper's pillow or when a beer stained and sticky vinyl record is tossed onto a battered Victrola, where a dulled and dirty needle is lowered onto its soiled and well worn grooves, at the pinnacle of a frat house party.
and as we sit on the outside looking in, we can certainly discount all the Democratic bawling of hogwash and hurling of balderdash about how poorly the war is going, all of Howard Dean's meaningless and inimical pettifoggery, and how we are all being hoodwinked by the imbeciles in the White House by simply looking at the action of the Justice Department. They certainly wouldn't be rearranging their meeting schedules, reassigning a myriad of agents, or changing their task team memberships unless something really big was cooking. and they wouldn't knowingly lose the war - and take the rap for letting terror loose on a blissfully ossified america — just to chase college kids, computer nerds, record industry fat cats, and the guys at Napster again, would they?
are they really be throwing all caution to the wind, spending an immense amount of time, effort and money, assigning FBI agents and bright young government attorneys trying to make their reputations, hunting up wire taps, chasing down leads, grilling college kids, putting check-out girls from Wal-Mart on the hot seat, examining miles of voluminous computer records, clambering through the immense stifling industrial warehouses holding the billing records of Sony and Warner and EMI and Vivendi, dragging boxes and boxes of claptrap and sticky notes and scribbles back to FBI offices all over the country if it wasn't really important enough to bump terror, spying, rabble rousing, the preaching of murder from the pulpits of hate, sedition, bomb making, arson, assaults on federal officers and incitement to murder off the docket? I mean, really.
In the mean time, is anybody at Justice keeping a dossier open on the new man in town, our new old pal, Matiur Rehman, the latest key al-Qaeda planner and most wanted man in Pakistan? Matiur is fresh from his latest attack on the US consulate in Karachi and is said to be involved in planning the next round of attacks in the USa. Matty Matt, as he is affectionately called by his circle of retainers, helped train thousands of like-minded brigands in the arts of hunting and fishing during the halcyon days of the al-Qaeda summer camps held there in the early 1990's. It's hoped that this hirsute man about town is drawing some moderate scrutiny, and that his picture is up on the wall somewhere near Whitey Bulger's, as the boys in the Ben Silver suits and ties and the Lily Pulitzer clad girls with their Vuitton poodle bags dig through the mountain of material assembled for this late great music files business.
Elliot, we thought the old payola problem was solved last summer when you choked out all the record company honchos and made them do the chicken. We thought they had all paid up. Now who are you gunning for? What outfits and what DJ's are going to go down now? How far afield will you go in your merciless attempt to root out the age old practice of handing a DJ a wad of fives to play a tune by some madcap new age crooner with a Mohawk on an upstate FM station that'll broadcast the whole sorry song at 3 a.m.? Will your dragnet extend all the way to Jamestown, Chili and beyond?
With New York City, the Brooklyn Bridge, Staten Island, the aqueducts, the tunnels, the utilities, the rail lines, the subways, the electrical substations, the harbor, the blessed Port of New York and New Jersey, the aquifers, Wall Street, the Thruway, the reservoirs and their dogs, the power grid, the Empire State Building, airports, the elevated rail lines, Madison Square Garden, parking lots, City Hall, and Mayor Bloomberg being specifically targeted by al-Qaeda, I'd think you'd be hot on the heels of the lads that brought down the Towers, chatted up the Bridge and threatened Niagara Falls.
But maybe you're right, the illicit dollar downloading of songs by the Pansies and the fears of payola in Palmyra are a clearer and more present danger than mere terror, Sarin gas production, the smuggling of Semtex into Coney Island, Islamist cabals in Brooklyn, active conspiracies to murder and the like. Nail them, Elliot, make the purveyors of sin and music do the perp walk on tip-toes. Get their pictures on the cover of the Post with their jackets over their heads. Grin when you lead them in and wear your best suit and shoes.
ah, the hubris of america five years after 9/11. Government lawyers, federal agents and state attorney generals are packing together and forming task forces to hunt down, identify and destroy downloader's, devotees of Napster and those who knowingly pass payola to DJs, while gentlemen that are actively plotting our destruction work away, night and day, with all the time in the world.
We urgently hope that Mr Rehman's picture stays on the top of the photos on those busy FBI bulletin boards and that his grainy image doesn't fall prey to some in-house monkey business and ends up out of sight and out of mind as the strike teams march past on their way to another scrimmage with the geeks from apple.
We also pray that Mr Spitzer keeps one ear cocked for the mob of gangsters whose calls from New York to Pakistan keep popping up on the NSa grid while he listens with the other one for the rhythmic tones which signify the completion of another dollar download, or the almost imperceptible closing of a wallet in a darkened aM studio on the far side of the Finger Lakes.
It's always a question of resources during war.
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