So for an hour, the cable news networks were reporting that a “suspicious boat” was fired on in the Potomac River by the Coast Guard. They were showing an image of the 14th Street Bridge between D.C. and Virginia. The river was supposedly a restricted area because of September 11 ceremonies at the Pentagon just a few dozen yards from the shoreline. The Coast Guard has just admitted that the whole business was a “training exercise.”

A “training exercise” on 9/11? Could that be possible? Somebody was staging a scene for a photograph, I’m sure of it, in a bizarre reprise of the incident earlier this year during which the White House sent Air Force craft to fly around Lower Manhattan for a pretty Air Force One photo op without telling anyone in the city, which terrified tens of thousands of people and led to a firing. One can only wonder whether there is something about the fact that there was a terrorist attack on this country eight years ago that somehow fails to penetrate the consciousnesses of the employees of this new administration.