Fee, Fie, Flu, F*%$#!

Influenza is a great democratic leveler, since it visits all – except perhaps the denizens of our national security operation, who get all the symptoms but can’t connect the dots to call it flu.

Which should make me feel better, but doesn’t, even if a terribly earnest President Barack Obama was pushing the connect-the-dots theory this evening. He was trying to explain what he intends to do about a whacko with explosive underwear getting on a Detroit-bound airliner, unmolested by any except his fellow passengers who declined to die that day.

Seems we knew the guy was half a bubble off plumb – after all, his father had said so. And we even knew that his country of origin was chock full of folks whose dislike for us was decidedly explosive. Literally.

But that wasn’t cause for concern because we had a system in place, just like I had a flu shot in place. Well, neither the flu shot nor the system worked.

Now I’ll probably survive the flu, unless family tires of hearing me complain. And the United States will probably survive the failed terror attempt.

But neither event is proof against a new challenge. So here, without charge, some suggestions that might at least help the government’s terrorism effort”

·        Profile, profile, then profile some more. Pretty much all of us would rather have the government dealing with a dozen discrimination lawsuits than a few hundred bodies. Yes, we’ve all seen cartoons about patting down Granny while waving Abdul Al-Boom-Boom through security, but like all generalizations, it contains a kernel of truth. Kernels these days are explosive.

·         Whack back. Yemen, where the latest nut job boarded the plane, is run as a corrupt family enterprise and the rest of the country (and world) be damned.  We’re sending lots of aid to Yemen. That should be stopped. The thugs currently in charge may not understand human rights, but they understand bank balances just fine. And those who whine that fiscal revenge will cause us to lose influence in Arab countries should contemplate what kind of influence we might lose from countries whose citizens seem anxious to blow us up.

Of course, when I recover from the flu and stop being so cranky, I’ll probably stop saying things like this. And when the hubbub passes, the government will probably go back to the way things were.

And so will the terrorists. They hate us, they want us dead and they are determined to cause it. They at least have clear goals and flexible tactics focused on the objective.

Why don’t we?

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