The Smell of Fear

More people will die of the Flu this year, than by the hands of terrorist.

The Smell of Fear:

Turns out that those of us who thought something smelled funny about the timing and all - peace had just broken out in Connecticut, for instance - were getting a whiff of more than just discarded aftershave.

It's outrageous enough that the arrest in London last week of 24 terror suspects was premature and dovetailed not with the accumulation of evidence against them, but with the White House's need to call the voters who dumped Joe Lieberman 'Defeatocrats' (House Majority Leader John Boehner) and coddlers of 'al-Qaida types' (Dick Cheney).

But the outrage is magnified by the fact that the Bush administration, even as it stoked national paranoia over a plot to detonate carryon liquids aboard transatlantic flights, was, according to the Associated Press, quietly defunding the development of technology to detect those very bombs. Indeed, the research arm of the Department of Homeland Security has become a 'rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course.' This is the bipartisan assessment of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the AP said.

Only Republicans are allowed to be this incompetent! It's 'heckuva job, Brownie' all over again, but with a wicked twist. When it comes to national security, the clueless fumbling of the Homeland Security bureaucracy feeds the Bush administration's politics of fear.

'Weeks before Sept. 11, this is going to play big,' a White House official, speaking anonymously about the London arrests, told Agence France Presse. Yeah, I'll bet, especially if the Defeatocrats can do no more than cringe and whimper that they're tough on terror, too.