Writing for National Review, Jonah Golberg’s Goldberg File on Friday started off with a chilling Ebola scenario:
If I were in charge of overseas contingency operations at the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, I would send as many suicide-bomber types back to America (and France and Britain) with a new weapon: Ebola. Airport scanners don’t pick it up. The incubation period is long enough to get the human biological weapons past screeners without detection. I’d tell them: Take as many connections as you can on the flight home. Help people with their luggage whenever possible. Leave a mess in the plane bathroom and a paper trail of your travels that will foment panic when ultimately revealed.
And, if you do get stopped by security officials en route, so be it. There’s lots of gloveless manhandling of suspected jihadis, which brings ample opportunities to infect interrogators, guards, FBI agents, etc. And every one of those infected Americans or Westerners furthers the cause.
But assuming you make it to Cleveland or Spokane or Washington, D.C., the only order of the day is: Have fun for as long as you can and maybe share your spit, sweat, and other stuff in as many creative ways as you can. See a show. Go to a water park and just hang out in the lazy river all day. Eat at a nice restaurant, leave a messy napkin. Don’t bother to wash your hands — and never flush (or if you do, make sure the toilet overflows!). Why, we’ll even give you all the fatwas and cash you need to hit the strip clubs and see a hooker or two. It’s all for the greater good. And when, alas, you start to feel really, really sick and you are at your most infectious, it’d be great if you could blow yourself up at a mall, or at least pass out at a McDonald’s or maybe in the middle of the F-train. If you opt for blowing yourself up, great. If not, try to tell the EMS team that you have something other than Ebola. The aim here is to keep the responders from treating you and the scene as a biohazard for as long as possible. And if you blow yourself up, don’t worry too much about killing a lot of bystanders, just make sure it’s really messy and there’s a lot of splatter.
Now, I don’t think this is a likely scenario, but I don’t think it’s an impossible one either. Regardless, that would be real terrorism, far more terrifying than blowing up a plane. Even one remotely successful effort along these lines would send America into a tailspin.
In a perverse way, America has been very lucky that our enemies have a childlike obsession with planes. There are lots of reasons why al-Qaeda likes blowing up aircraft. Planes inhabit a special place in the Western psyche. Stopping air traffic has huge economic ripple effects. Blowing up a plane demonstrates an ability to get past our best security efforts. Etc. On the flipside, blowing up planes is hard, as we’ve seen. But, if you send enough Ebola (or some other disease) through the friendly skies, that would shut down the airlines even more effectively than any bomb.
I hope and pray that our enemies remain uncreative. But it’d be foolish to plan on it.
The comments above were actually an aside to what was the title of Goldberg’s article: Hillary Clinton: Dukakis in a Pantsuit? Very descriptive and something that chills us in more ways than one.
Obamanomics — Are We Better Off Than Six Years Ago?
From Patriot Post:
“[I]t is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than it was when I took office,” Barack Obama said in a speech Thursday, echoing his comments in his “60 Minutes” interview last weekend. Of course, that’s an awfully low bar, isn’t it? And, as the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis notes, we haven’t exactly been going gangbusters. “But consider,” says Pethokoukis, “(a) the economy has been unable to consistently grow at more than 2% throughout this expansion; (b) trend GDP remains below its pre-recession path; (c) the share of adults with any kind of job remains well below pre-recession levels; (d) there are just 1.2 million more private jobs today than January 2008 despite 15.6 million more adults; (e) wage growth remains weak; (f) the megabanks are even bigger, (g) the pace of startups is lackluster; (h) median household income, as measured by the Census Bureau, was 8 percent lower last year than in 2007.” A few more stats: The poverty rate is up, even though government subsistence is at a record high, and homeownership is down almost 3%. Consumer confidence took a steep drop from 93.4% in August to 86% in September. Obama admitted the American people “don’t yet feel enough of the benefits.” No kidding. His solution? To raise the minimum wage (which will kill more jobs) and to spend more on infrastructure. Where have we heard that before? Finally, Obama noted, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” He got that right.
Obama’s I·crock Statement
Thanks to RD for forwarding this clip exposing what a blowhard sniveling duplicitous POS POTUS we have:
It is a short clip, less than 60 seconds, be sure and wait for the “punch” line. From The Washington Free Beacon.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10202804003885630
R Mall
