Good to be back

Ahh, it's good to be back from the rest and relaxation of doing nothing during a holiday, to the rest and relaxation that doing nothing while the small fraction of people who have jobs in this country are heading to work. And what happened whilst we were gone? The Senate finally passed their health care bill, I got a free three-month preview of HBO and Cinemax, and a lunatic tried to blow up an airplane. Since we've hashed out the health care bill ad nauseum here and most of you are too self-absorbed and unwilling to admit just how much me getting free movies in HD means to global security and well-being, I guess that means we'll just have to deal with the fallout and pants wetting that is inevitably flowing from the failed terrorist attack.

Yes, for all the billions upon billions we spend on security, homeland defense, wars, and various measures designed to protect us, it seems that the best defense America has is a terrorist fucking up the attack in the exact place he was trying to attack after numerous threats, warnings, and specific descriptions of his goals and beliefs should have had the 5-0 hauling his ass in or, at the very least, not allowing him to board a plane. Maybe that's the future for Homeland Security: no screening, intel, or police work, we just flood the arms market with so many shoddy bomb parts that any weapon Al Qaeda does make is destined to malfunction.

But because we live in an intelligent country filled with so many smart and worthwhile elected leaders, the response to this has been swift and extremely well thought out. There's already been a call to racially profile every Muslim. Jim DeMint used the attacks as an obvious rallying point to... attack unions. Plus there were the standard attempts to Monday Morning QB and place political blame while claiming they weren't doing either. I'm sure in the next days/hours there will be calls for war with Yemen, war with Nigeria, a ham-handed attempt to point out that both the terrorist and the President are black, an attempt to place the blame for this attack on some innocuous section of popular culture (early candidate: hip-hop music), and perhaps a drive to have everyone who enters an airport rectally scanned for any components that could conceivably explode. Because the standard operating procedure of America's leaders after any high media profile terrorism event is to wet themselves and cower in fear for as long as possible while not doing anything effective.

Ahhh, it's good to be back.