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.
 
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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?