Monday, July 12, 2004


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A comment I posted to the Rescheduling post on the blog of Matthew Yglesias.

Why are people so un-imaginative about this?

People are talking about what if there is an attack in the days before the election or right before the polls open on Election Day. People are talking about elections in a single location being disrupted. People assume that a terrorist attack will be a large target possibly bringing down a city's infrastructure.

How about this scenario? At 9 am, in ten major U.S. cities, two suicide bombers pick random polling stations, walk in with explosives, and destroy the place and every voter in it. Three hours later, a similar number of suicide bombers destroy another set of seemingly random polling places. They may or may not be in the same cities as the 9 am sites.

How are you feeling if you were thinking of voting later in the day, after work?

Update:

G.C. had a reply to my post, mentioning posts like this and this.

I replied:

I'm not saying that plans are a good idea. In fact, I might even be support for your argument. I don't have any particular faith in the current administration to anticipate a creative terrorist attack. If they can't make the connection from "yes, we are aware of al-Qaeda plans to hijack airplanes" to 'well, terrorists can use hijacked airplanes as weapons," then I'm pretty sure that motivated and intelligent terrorists can do something unexpected if they can just get people across the border.

It's really funny. I've seen "no terrorist attacks on American soil since September 11" put forward as a reason to vote for Bush. (I almost want to say it was in a TV ad, though it may have been a blog.) And here they are trying to have their cake and eat it. . . if there are no terrorist attacks, then Bush is good, but if there are, then that shouldn't influence people to vote against Bush.

Amusing, it appears G.C. and I both attended the same undergraduate institution. And it seems we both wrote a column for the newspaper.


(5:36 PM)

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