Be afraid. Be very afraid. And don’t say we didn’t warn you. Nothing changes an undesirable news cycle quite like another terror threat, does it? As the AP article notes: “The sudden warning returns the nation’s attention to terrorism, the issue that President Bush has highlighted as a central theme of his re-election campaign, after intense focus on other subjects like Iraq and prisoner abuses in Iraq. Bush has lost ground in the polls, falling in approval ratings to the lowest point of his presidency.“
To be fair, releasing pics of the possible suspects is probably more helpful in preventing a future attack than the usual exhortations to buy duct tape. And nobody want to see another 9/11, particularly those of us who live in NYC. Still, the very fact that news articles have to concede that Dubya may just be pushing the Panic button for political points proves how untrustworthy this president has become. And don’t you love how Bush officials keep suggesting that Al Qaeda wants to “have some impact on the electoral process,” as if voting Democratic means the terrorists have won? Sorry, but you’ll have to count me among the many Americans who thinks that terrorists have more to fear from John Kerry than they ever would from Dubya’s haphazard and crony-driven homeland security agenda.
The fact that the Dept. of Homeland Security isn’t raising the terror alert level despite the fact that they are claiming that holidays are supposed to be a prime potential target and Monday just happens to be a major holiday… tells me that this whole thing is indeed smoke and mirrors for political gain.
What’s interesting is to contrast this to December of 2003. We had just captured Saddam and were being told that this had made us safer and yet the terror alert levels were raised to the second highest rating shortly after Saddam was in custody.
As for the Spanish election analogy… it’s more political spin. The reality is that the Spanish didn’t reject the conservative PM’s hand-picked successor because of the train bombings. They did it because the PM had personally orchestrated a distortion campaign to blame Basques even after he knew that there was very strong evidence pointing at Muslims rather than Basques.