Roger Simon: I Used to Be a Pussy But Now I Hate Barack Obama

Roger L. Simon says:

Mrs. Obama is apparently out on the hustings giving forth with a fair amount of political bombast like "I don't want my girls to live in a country based on fear."

What?

I haven't noticed that I'm living in a country based on fear.

Ahem. Nearly two years ago, New Yorkers was treated to rumors of a pending attack on our subways. Our esteemed Senator, Chuck Schumer, kept his cool and said, correctly, that the threat "was specific but was not corroborated and not of the highest credibility."

(Sort of like a Richard Miniter article, but I digress.)

Roger Simon, always the rank opportunist, took Schumer's sound byte as an excuse to publicly soil his undies:

Let's hope for Chuck's sake (among many others') that nothing happens, because if it does, that statement will come back to haunt him until his dying day. As it is, he seems like a fool and a posturer. This pose would have been unmasked (although certainly not by his pals at Reuters) by a simple question: "What, pray, sir, determines whether a terrorist's threat is credible or not?"

Difficult question, isn't it? In fact, I would say in most circumstances it is almost impossible to answer because the people likely to blow up innocents on subways are not entirely rational and therefore not easily assessed in the normal manner. Indeed the crew who blew up the London tube were a group of ragtag irregulars - evidently not under orders from Bin Laden or anybody else, all easily caught in a matter of days - yet they were able to murder many people.

Would they have been considered credible?

I don't know. You'll have to ask Senator Schumer. From my point of view the anonymous government official Reuters quoted is living in a dream land. Not just this threat, but all threats of this nature are "undetermined" until they happen... or not. The rest is just playing politics with people's lives.