"Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat"

I've been saying this for a while now but David A. Bell in an op-ed at the LAT puts it more eloquently. We've allowed this White House to throw the entire country into a state of panic over terrorism that is hugely overblown relative to the actual danger terrorists present to "our freedoms." There are simply not enough terrorists in the entire world, even if they could put aside their own sectarian differences and all band together, to invade our country and take over our government.

The Bush administration and their hand wringing wrongwingnuts would have you believe these vile evil-doers are massing on every border and hatching plots in every mosque to take us over and force our women into burquas and compel us to pray to Mecca six times a day. If it was just a random guy on a street corner plying this fantasy, he'd been in Bellevue by now under psychiatric care for paranoia.

Yes, the terrorists hate us. But they don't stand a prayer of "winning." Hell they're barely even in the game. They're mostly just sitting on the bench watching our troops do the work of fostering turmoil for them. Our troops have killed at a minimum, if you take the lowest estimates, over 100,000 people. How many has bin Laden taken credit for lately?

Hell, bin Laden has a lower disapproval rate than Bush since our president declared his war on terror. More people die in car accidents than from terrorism every single day. We should think about that before we willing cede any more of our freedoms to a unitary executive in order to "protect" ourselves from phantom threats.