A Few Questions Regarding Our Death Spiral of Anti-Terrorist Reactions:
The Rude Pundit's no counter-terrorism expert, and, unlike every other pusillanimous pundit puking forth, he ain't gonna pretend to be. But, you know, it doesn't take a degree from the war college to figure out that the same tactics, rinsed and repeated, are gonna get the same results.
1. Why is Barack Obama getting blamed for not dealing with Yemen? The USS Cole was attacked in October of 2000. That leaves a tiny bit of Clinton and eight years of Bush the Dumber to have, oh, who the fuck knows, actually done something about the collapsing state of Yemen. Bonus points: after 9/11, Bush sent 100 troops to Yemen for "training." It's a little like sending a mouse with a toothpick to face down a gang of cats. Of course, instead of doing anything about Yemen, other than the occasional Predator drone strike, we did something about Iraq, which...oh, fuck, never mind. Bonuser points: Obama was already sending drones to bomb Yemen weeks before the taint bomber ever lifted his nutsack to get the explosives. (That's not a statement on the legality of the drone attacks.)
2. Why does the United States have to lose its shit every time some blip occurs in our system? By the Rude Pundit's awesome mathematical abilities, he's figure out that, since 9/11, roughly 8 billion planes flights have occurred in America, carrying roughly 20 gajillion people, some of them repeatedly. And while you don't want a single plane to ever fall out of the sky or get its shit blown up, that's pretty good odds, and one Nigerian flame-broiling his balls out of so many gajillion fliers seems more a burp in security that needs to be corrected (with some firing and tightening of procedures) than a complete meltdown and holy-fuck-we're-all-gonna-die-let's-have-sex-quick. It just doesn't seem to warrant turning the crazy level up to "weasels fucking on meth." Naive? Sure. But the Rude Pundit's just sick of being told to be scared.
3. If we do lose our shit every time some Nigerian fries his junk, doesn't that mean that terrorists are winning? It barely needs to be said, no? That terrorism contains its purpose in its name. That the real result of 9/11 is that Osama bin Laden kicked our asses because we played his game, spending ourselves into domestic insecurity in order to deal with a ghost of a foreign threat. We've done practically everything the drama queens of al Qaeda could ask. Check out the goals of terrorism from a 2005 article by a real terrorism expert, Ernest Evans (who has been writing about this for three decades).
The Rude Pundit is not seeking to diminish the importance of screening at airports. He is not saying that it wouldn't have been terrifying to be on the plane with the smell of burnt cock in the cabin. But we're in an insane death spiral of tactics that have failed. All the idiots screaming for war forget that we've been doing war. In other words, even in the new administration, why are we damned to commit the same mistakes again and again?
