Boogey-man booger - scared yet?

In a bizarre twist to the "terrorist scare" in England is the notion that the lotion is the threat.

I just rhymed that like Jesse Jackson - right off the top of my head.. because I'm talented like that.

Here's a reality check;

Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American World Airways' third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from London's Heathrow International Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. On December 21, 1988, the aircraft flying this route, a Boeing 747-121 registered N739PA and named "Clipper Maid of the Seas", was destroyed as it flew over Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, when 12 to 16 oz (340 to 450 g) of plastic explosive was detonated in its forward cargo hold, triggering a sequence of events that led to the rapid destruction of the aircraft.

From the Communist Times:

The most frightening thing about the foiled plot to use liquid explosives to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic is that both the government and the aviation industry have been aware of the liquid bomb threat for years but have done little to prepare for it.

Essentially what you have is a bunch of incompetent idiots that really don't give a shit about "protecting" anyone. They're just really good at scaring people into supporting them politically.

I just thought of a great Warcraft analogy.. see.. there's this ability called "fear". You can fear your opponent to gain an advantage (they run off and can't do anything), but it's subject to diminishing returns. In other words, the more you fear your opponent, the less effective it is, and the less fear you actually generate, until the point where it's essentially useless and does nothing.

CBS News Poll:

The arrests in Britain have not helped President Bush's popularity so far, the CBS poll finds. His job approval remains exactly at 36 percent, where it was a month ago. Even the president's rating for handling terrorism – his strongest suit – remains unchanged at 51 percent.

That's what's going on in America today, but the media is really good at supporting the White House propaganda machine. Despite their repeated attempts at fear, America is starting to say "oh shut the fuck up you idiots".

Arianna Huffington has a great column describing how the media is simply the tool they use to cast the fear on you.

The White House fabricated a connection and a neat fit between the "developments" and the "Democrats." But isn't it up to the mainstream media to expose fraudulent connections instead of endorsing them as fact?

The truth, which, sadly, you won't find in the New York Times story, is that in no way do the arrests in Britain bolster the GOP's claims to be the party to best defend America. And the only way they will is if the media swallow Ken Mehlman's talking points and turn them into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In fact, given that we know for a fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that we currently have over 130,000 troops in Iraq, and have spent over three hundred billion dollars there, the Occam's Razor interpretation of these "developments" would be that they demonstrate how badly the White House has squandered our resources and how much the War on Terror is, as even George Will admitted today on This Week, "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation."

Personally, I feel bad for the morons that allow themselves to be frightened. Sure, it's a dangerous world. I've actually done the math in a previous post about a year ago comparing the odds of dying in a car accident to dying in a terrorist attack.

Still, it's all more of that fear mongering. I did some rough calculations. You have about a .014% chance of dying in a car accident in any particular year, and a .0004% chance of being killed in a terrorist attack. Keep in mind that terrorist attack percentage is inflated because of 9/11. If I averaged over the last 50 years instead of the last 5 years, the odds would be negligible, while the car accident percentage would be quite a bit higher.

The essential point being - it's bizarre to credit the Republicans for being more competent to handle issues related to terrorism and security when they've totally botched everything they've done. I'm not kidding. They've botched every single thing, domestic and foreign, that they've done.

It's quite possible there may be another terrorist attack. That's the sad reality that we live in today. You can prepare, and try and prevent, but as shown the Republicans are not really concerned about that. They are simply concerned about spinning the news into yet more scare tactics.

We still get in the car every day even though there's a vastly higher chance that we'll be injured then we would from a terrorist attack.. but we're afraid of the boogey man instead of the idiots on the road?

I don't get that...

** update **

Oh for fucks sake.. can we put all those assholes in prison yet?