Three months to election day. And a fresh round of terror warnings. What concerns me is not so much the warning but
1) The sense that there have been too many vague terror alerts without anything happening – and by that I mean the arrest and successful prosecution of some actual terrorists here in the US.
2) A sense that there is so much skepticism of anything that comes out of this administration’s mouth that warnings are not going to get taken seriously, even if the threat is real.
Now I’m still willing to believe that our law enforcement agencies are sincerely trying to find and stop terrorists. But it would help me and I think a lot of other citizens be less cynical about the whole thing if we saw or heard more than just vague threat announcements ever so often. I’m not an expert on how terrorists get busted, but it seems to me that if our law enforcement services know enough about domestic plots to be able to provide warnings about specific times and places, they should know enough about who is doing the planning to make some arrests and make some cases in court (hint – Jose Padilla doesn’t count). It also doesn’t help credibility when the government can’t even produce an accurate report on how many terror attacks have occurred recently.
At least on the left side of the fence I don’t have a lot of company in my willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. It’s not just the flame-throwers like Pandagon who think the government is either deliberately politicizing, flat-out lying and/or too incompetent to do a good job of protecting the country from real threats. Even more moderate lefties like Orcinus are highly skeptical of what’s going on.