While I agree with Tom Ridge’s notion that most Americans have the attention span of a gnat in heat, I think even infants, imbeciles and PhD’s have figured out by now that terrorism is a bad deal and we should never, ever, drop a few coins in the bucket when they knock on the door.
So why did Mr. Ridge feel compelled today, of all days, to tell us that our Terror-Watch Horoscope for today is: THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!
Count me in with the cynics - they’re doing this to deflect attention from the Dick Gephardt - I mean John Edwards - announcement.
Bonus Terror Watch Announcement prediction: one will occur about five minutes into Kerry’s acceptance speech (moving us to code Neapolitan), complete with a Bronco car chase. . . .
Actually, I’ll be quelling those fears on November 2. But in the meantime, don’t forget to cover up those a/c registers - that’s where the monsters come out.
Maybe, and I don’t know if I fully subscribe to the “it’s all politically-oriented” point-of-view…but how in the hell do you explain today’s announcement otherwise?
I mean, what a total waste of energy.
<Tom Ridge> News Alert - America Please Listen!
Al Qaeda will attack us. We don’t know when. We don’t know where. We don’t know how.
Thank you, now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
</Tom Ridge>
Annoy Karl Rove – take some friends to go see Fahrenheit 9/11. Chortle like mad when Moore talks about manipulating the Terror Alert levels to keep the citizenry in fear.
I’ll go out on a limb and predict right now that the Monday after the Democratic convention, there will be new terrorist warnings but nothing specific enough to be useful. Also in October 2004, Osama bin Laden will be captured.
I would guess that there is an increase in non-specific “chatter,” and that they probably feel it doesn’t hurt to ask people to keep half an eye open without formally raising the alert level. It’s a reasonable concern that raising the alert level too often, or having it “high” too often, will dilute its impact. They are probably also concerned that officially raising the alert level will have every idiot screaming “Propaganda!”, but also concerned that if they don’t act in someway on
non-specific info and something does happen, every idiot will scream “Intelligence Failure.” And they’d be right.
So if the terror alert is low and I see a couple guys hop off their camels and load 5 tons of fertilizer into a rented van I should just assume they cultivating a large corn crop?
Ya know, Lieu alluded to it earlier, but there certainly is a whole Wag the Dog aspect to this whole thing, only the positions are flipped. The folks that are calling people silly and paranoid today are the ones that were pointing fingers and jumpin up and down back in the summer of 98. And vice-a-versa.
I wasn’t inclined to believe Clinton then and I’m not inclined to believe Bush now. Now, it’s come to light that Clinton was on the up-and-up on his reasoning behind lobbing some missles Osama’s way, but at the time, it sure looked dubious. After all, the timing sure appeared to be handy.
Again, my BS detector is going off. Will time prove me wrong again? I’m not so sure. It seems that with Clinton, it was mostly Clinton that was trying to pull shit on us. The current administration seems more coordinated in their shit pulling.
Come on now, Bricker. You insist on specifics? Ask Mr. Ridge for them. This “warning” contains none whatever. The only “specific” in it is that he did not see fit to raise the threat color level. There is, in short, no basis to believe it represents any change in the situation or the administration’s knowledge of it.
So you tell us what this was about. Given the tenor of this administration’s conduct, isn’t the timing of this announcement worth some suspicion?
Nope. I was calling the same people paranoid and silly back then as well. To me it’s not a partisan issue; it’s just common sense. Now what really chaps my ass about
the Clinton situation is that he didn’t take the best opportunity he had to Tomahawk Osama because he was afraid that the Right would claim it was just to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal. Now that is a sad state of affairs, when policy is dictated by the fringe of the opposition. I never was pro-Bush, but I do feel he is somewhat deserving of a defense from some of the ridiculous assaults he gets on this board. It’s the ridiculousness of the arguments by the anti-Bush contingent that has transformed me into, well, not so much pro-Bush, but Anti-anti-Bush.
You know, it sure isn’t healthy when so many people either disregard or suspect the reasons for terror alerts. I think we have more than a simple failure to communicate here, and not all of the blame can be put onto political partisans.
Sad truth? I’m pretty much discounting terror alerts any more, because I don’t trust this administration’s competence or integrity. I think 1.) they’ve made terrorism much more likely by their incredibly inept bungling in Iraq, 2.) their intelligence is unsound, specifically or in a broader sense and 3.) their track record for blatant corruption prevents belief that they’re above manipulating terror alerts for political advantage.
Maybe this isn’t the right thread for this, but I genuinely don’t understand the support Bush/Cheney still have from conservatives. Bush/Cheney spout good sound bytes but their actions have been directly antithetical to so many conservative values: limiting goverment intrusion in citizens’ lives, fiscal responsiblity, extreme care before involvement in foreign conflicts, etc. They’re neocons, i.e. drunk with the lure of empire rather than focused on American imperatives, rather than actually conservative. I realize Kerry/Edwards represent the philosophical opposite but sheesh, I don’t see that they’re that much farther removed from the conservative philosophical ideal than Bush/Cheney.
I honestly don’t get it.
There is a bleating herd aspect to this board, and it’s increasingly irritating. People on the conservative side of the fence have stopped posting because of the political sway - Scylla, for example. I don’t feel like simply sitting by and letting these things go unchallenged.
The Bush administration has been criticized by some for not revealing infomration in the days before 9/11, even though - obviously - whatever information they had was lacking in specifics.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I agree that a case can be made for there being a political aspect to the warnings, but self-confidently announcing that these are “right on schedule” is not making that case, and in fact credits the OP with a level of precognition I don’t believe she possesses.
She’s now offered some speciifc predictions – IN ADVANCE, which I think you’ll agree is the sine qua non of a “prediction.” If she’s right, I’ll laud her. (One exception: we’re at Orange NOW, and have been for some time, so her guess of October at Orange level of alert is meaningless - it’s just a guess that things will stay as they are.)
If she’s not correct, though, it calls into serious question how much this announcement was “on schedule” and how much of that phrasing was the OP doing another mindless babble that translates into “Me no like Bush, ugh.”
Wanna know what’s really fun to do with the terror warnings? Comparing their level of specificity with the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB).
You remember, the one that wasn’t specific enough for Shrub to bother to act, even though it warned that al-Qaeda was going to attack America, that hijacking airplanes was likely to be part of the deal, and the only two U.S. locations named were New York City and Washington, D.C.
I’m not sure any of them have risen to that level of specificity. The present non-alert alert (since the alert level remains the same) has no specifics whatsoever, of course.
Perhaps it’s because airline revenues are finally going up and they haven’t kicked in their share to the GOP. Nothing like a terror alert in the middle of tourist season to make those numbers drop like a rock.
