Al Qaeda still wants to kill us but we’ve been... - The Massive Continuity of Ducks

“Al Qaeda still wants to kill us but we’ve been pretty successful at keeping them from doing that. For some reason we needed a new boogeyman. I wonder why?

We’ve spent trillions on Homeland Security, outfitted every Barney Fife in the nation with robo-cop gear and allowed the government to spy on Americans at will. I don’t know about you but I kind of expect that all of that should actually be worth something. If we’re going to run around tearing our hair out every time somebody puts out a scary video maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that strategy.

This is not to say that there isn’t a threat for the people in the Middle East and there is a legitimate argument to be made that it requires intervention from outside the region lest the whole place blows up even further. (I’m not sure we won’t make things worse —- we usually do — but I understand the arguments for it.) What is galling is the fact that they continue to treat us like children and tell us spooky bedtime stories so they can scare us into supporting their commercial/geopolitical goals. Maybe those goals are worth pursuing but we’ll never know because we’re chasing evil Ninjas who are allegedly coming over the border to unleash mushroom clouds on American cities.

[…]

Al Qaeda has a strategy to create dramatic terrorist attacks on the West. We’ve known this for a long, long time. That has not changed. ISIS is a different problem. The fact that the war hawks pimped this line about ISIS being worse than Al Qaeda should make everyone skeptical of what they are hearing about this whole thing —- and skeptical of the motivations behind it. How many times do we have to be lied to?”

—

So they aren’t more dangerous to us than al Qaeda after all? Why would they have said that?

When I suggested that the GOP was trying to make us really super afraid of ISIS because there’s an election coming up, and they do this before every election going back a decade, the stupidsphere lost its collective shit at me, and said that I believed — I am not making this up — that ISIS is “a Republican plot to win elections.” Of course, that’s not what I said, but boy when those idiots get stuck on a narrative, they *really* go all-in with it.

ISIS is bad news, and especially bad news to its region, but we don’t need to be wetting our pants about them here in America, because, in spite of what the GOP and the bedwetters in the stupidsphere want us to believe, the entire stupid homeland security apparatus has been pretty good at keeping the bad guys out of America (unless you count the handful of morons who were entrapped by FBI, posing as terrorists, who never would have gotten a single idea off the ground otherwise.)

The stupidsphere desperately wants to start dropping bombs all over the place, because they don’t know how to do anything else, and they really need to feel macho, facts be damned.

(via wilwheaton)