Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The Christmas Bomb Worked

The bomb on Northwest flight 253 was not a failure. It worked quite well.

You see, terrorists aren't trying to kill people, they're trying to cause terror. A packet of PETN the size of a sanitary napkin taped to some guy's junk doesn't need to explode to cause terror, it just needs to get past security, then cause an uproar on the plane.

Oh, Obama will make a few speeches, a few appointed officials will play musical chairs, and we'll have a few more reasons to hate flying. We'll spend a few billion dollars on some new mandated machines at the airports that are designed to sniff out crotch bombs (and give fat bonuses to the execs at the companies that make them). In the end, though, we're as safe as we are now. The next bomb won't be PETN. We'll be expecting that, and it's apparently too hard for the nincompoops Bin Laden manages to brainwash to set off, as proven by this guy and the shoe bomber. Meanwhile, the terrorists are rolling around laughing at the stupid Americans getting their panties in a bunch over a pair of explosive BVDs, whilst plotting for the next way to smuggle bombs into densely populated spaces.

How do we know what the terrorists will do next? Here's an idea: hire Tom Clancy to come up with ways terrorists could attack us, and then hire a few fortune tellers from Detroit's Greektown to cast stones on the likelihood of them being carried out. Build machines to install at the airports to detect signs of these plots. Arrest anyone who fits Tom's character descriptions, and send Jack Ryan to kill Bin Laden.

Or we could listen to reason.