Fear Itself

from Crooks and Liars

Pardon me for even entertaining the specious link he makes between illegal immigration and terrorism, but let’s walk down that crooked path just a little, ok?

Not to say the threat of terrorism isn’t real or that we shouldn’t do anything about it, because of course we should, but we should have a rational, sensible policy based on the real threat, not an over-hyped perception of one.

The fact is that even “if terrorists were able to pull off"one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, … your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.”

Terrorists would have to pull off six 9/11s every year to equal the roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year coming from the more than 40 million uninsured (pdf) in this country, and if there is a terrorist with the will and the capability to pull that off, there will never be a border fence that will stop them, and nothing could be more dangerous to this country than a paranoid politician whose brain is so ate up with Lou Dobb’s Disease that he’s willing to sell every other issue down the river in search of a cure.