The sky is falling, the sky is falling. It's al Qaeda

As you may have heard, Fox News claimed that the wild fires in California were set by al Qaeda -- only one of the many claims made for al Qaeda's super powers -- and may have even suggested they somehow controlled the Santa Anna winds.

Keith Olbermann pointed out that the FBI memo Fox was pointing to as "five days" old was actually about 5 years old. It referred not to California but to Colorado. Keith suggested that the next thing Fox might claim is that "al Qaeda causes night to fall." Oh my, oh my. The sky is falling.

He then asked his guest, Rachel Maddow why it is that the Bush administration feels so compelled to ascribe supernatural powers to al Qaeda. Her response was dead on:

They have to come up with super-human powers for Al Qaeda because they want to use Al Qaeda to justify a super-extreme agenda for the United States of America. If you really, really want to radically transform our government and radically transform who we are as a country; if you want East German style policing, and people informing on their neighbors, and you want to get rid of the Fourth Amendment, and you want endless wars conducted for profit; if you want to completely get rid of the safety net function and the regulatory function of the government; if you have an agenda that radical, you better have a really radical justification for it. And so they have to elevate this band of death cults, fundamentalist criminals into a threat that is greater than the Soviet Union ever was when they not only had a military but they had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at our country. They have to make Al Qaeda even worse than that.