Tucked away in the update to a Glenn Greenwald post:
Dick Morris revealingly predicted that revelation of this [foiled London airplane] plot would give the President a 10-point bounce in the polls, yet he received almost no boost at all.
By golly, he’s right. Mid-thirties and falling.
In addition to causing people to take the terrorism threat less seriously, playing political games with these threats also causes people to be far more skeptical of their government’s statements regarding terrorism. It’s the classic Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome, and in the terrorism context, that can be a very dangerous problem.
Someone once asked me, “What would you do about terrorism?” My answer: “In very general terms, I would a) try to solve the problem, and b) try to avoid scaring people unnecessarily.” That’s what I think a responsible leader would do. Bush has done the exact opposite on both counts.
17 August 2006 at 3:29 pm
That is what I am missing the most in our leaders today, really from both parties, a responsible measured and mature view.
20 August 2006 at 1:58 am
I have no reason to suspect that the ‘failed’ airline bombers were not genuinely preparing to carry out some dastardly act, but I am cynical enough to believe that the decision to go ahead and arrest them and hype up the security was taken purely in order to avert the press from post-war analysis which would inevitably question what on earth Israel has gained by it’s actions, how the Bush administration had been pushing Israel to invade for months and how they have succeeded in raising Nasrallah’s ratings higher than he could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams.
The timing was just too much of a co-incidence …