Scare "tactics"

Hi Folks.

Been a while.

Let's jump right back in:

The movie-of-the-week is clearly getting ahead of the facts on the Times Square Bombing story. And that's because the movie version is clearly an order of magnitude more interesting than the reality, which, as I see it, boils down to this:

1. Some guy gets it into his head, somehow, to blow up Times Square.

2. He acquires a vehicle, and does much less to disguise its origins than your average high school car thief.

3. He buys some firecrackers, a couple of jugs of gasoline, and the propane tanks from a BBQ. Then, for good measure, he puts some dirt in the back of the car.

4. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't prove effective.

5. The entire US government mobilizes, to a degree you'd never see with even the worst case of non-"terrorist" mass murder, and catches the guy quite fast. Whereupon he confesses.


Instead, we get:

1. Muslim terrorist sleeper agent gets activated by the Taliban

2. He uses his months of training in terrorist camps in Pakistan to assemble a deadly WMD.

3. Only thanks to the eagle eye of one (two? three?) simple yet patriotic sidewalk vendors is America saved from cataclysm.

4. Obama tries to pin it all on a white man, while the Evil Terrorist plots his escape.

5. Massive fumbles almost allow Bin Laden Jr. to escape, and then, horror of horrors, he's allowed due process.


Taken together with the Christmas Day event in which the nation panicked when a man set his groin on fire, I don't know whether to be thrilled that this is the best our enemies can do, or to mourn the fact that this seems to be all they have to do to utterly destabilize the national discourse.

We demand that Iraq and Afghanistan, nations where real bombs actually detonate on a scale that's almost unimaginable, adopt a perfect democracy. But at the same time, we allow a couple of non-functional explosives wielded by borderline incompetents to derail our own democracy. When The Terrorists get us this excited with an M-80, they've won.

JEK
Calvinist outlook makes every day left unexploded into something of great wonder.