Booooo! Don't Let the Cons Scare You into Sacrificing American Values

Quick, hide under your desk. Wait, that was the Cold War. Oh yeah, duct tape the doors and report unattended packages.

Get a grip, folks. The "24" scenarios of terrorists schlepping nukes in panel trucks or releasing biotoxins into air handlers make for great television but hardly the basis for homeland security policy. While the threat from Islamic radicals clearly demands our vigilance, the chance of being injured or killed in a terror attack is infinitesimal compared to say being struck by lightening.
What's far less remote is the chance that amoral, sleazeball Republican hacks like Jim DeMint will whip up terrorism frenzy simply for partisan advantage. The brouhaha over Northwest 253 has very little to do with reevaluating intelligence, no-fly lists, airport security measures, etc. which President Obama has rightly initiated and a whole more to do with Republicans reviving an issue that worked well for them for seven years -- fear mongering.

I don't use the phrase "amoral, sleazeball hacks" casually. What else can you call those who know full well that every procedure followed was a carryover from the Bush administration's playbook; that the mastermind behind the plot was released from Guantanamo under Bush; and that they voted en masse against Obama's Homeland Security budget and have blocked his highly qualified nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration. And yet, and yet! they accuse Obama of "not being serious enough about terrorism."

Obama! Who has committed 64,000 more troops to Afghanistan -- the first 17,000 of which in February fulfilled a Pentagon request that Bush sat on for months. Who has doubled the use of Predator air strikes in Pakistan and initiated missile attacks against al-Qaida in Somalia and Yemen. And who has done so to the great dismay of his base. Yet these amoral, sleazeball hacks have shamelessly politicized what could have been the deaths of 289 innocent people.

Lest we forget, we lived for 45 years with "Mutually Assured Destruction." Yet even with this vastly more perilous threat, once Joe McCarthy was censured -- unimaginable today given how Republicans revel in such lunacy -- the dialogue on either side never again devolved into the psychosis, paranoia and duplicity Republicans have foisted on us since 2001. And now they want to use the same scare tactics to slither back into power.

When you hear Cheney, Rove, DeMint and other right-wing scaremongers bloviate that Obama is making America "less safe" -- although they no longer have access to secret intelligence to know one way or the other -- remember 9/11 happened on their watch when they did have access to secret intelligence that warned "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."