It's A Gas Gas Gas... Apparently

Again, nothing happened.

Michelle Malkin and Redstate and the folks at Lucianne can continue to jump around all they wish, but this won't change: what we're seeing is terrorist plots get caught, foiled, stopped in their tracks.  How, exactly, is that not a good thing? Who, really, is opposed to catching these folks before something bad happens?

And while I'm not a minimizer - I think reasonable people should note, yet again, who's doing this stuff and what it says about who we should be watching rather carefully - I'm not sure "hapless" or "hare-brained" won't fit here as it did with Fort Dix.  Surely someone looked at the gas lines to Kennedy, noted that they run through residential Queens, and said "we should probably keep an eye on that."  It's hard for me to buy that this plot seriously had a chance of getting, er, off the ground.

My point is simply that conservatives have it wrong, and have for some time - the debate we're having about how best to stop terrorist attacks is not about "let's not take these threats seriously." It's the "let's not trample on our basic freedoms to achieve the desired results" (both Fort Dix and the events Kennedy point to familiar police work and tools already well available to law enforcement) and "let's not spend the rest of our lives hiding under the bed" fear mongering that's the issue here.  Yes, since 9/11 the world has changed.  We all get this.  It's how we adapt that's the question before us now as ever.  And I'd say, given the fact that we foil terror plots that so far things seem to be going well.  I thought that was a good thing... but then, I can't do angry and shrill like Michelle. Just not my shtick.

(And this, I think, is a partial answer to J, good old J, good friend J...in Baltimore: as conservatives get shriller and less sensible about their "lefties suck at security" arguments, a lot of the old "Democrats are soft on defense" charges weaken considerably.  That argument had legs, I'd say, when the GOP could criticize Dems with no point for comparison.  But Iraq is their war, the war on terror is their construction, and the questions about their management of it are quite real. We're stopping terrorists with the kind of "law enforcement works" notions liberals talked about after 9/11.  While I think "soft on defense will always be with us, I'm not nearly so convinced that a campaign built on that alone - hint hint, Giuliani and McCain - will fly.)