Thank You, Dick Cheney, For Approving Torture

I've complained before about how increasingly difficult it is to satirize pundits and politicians in post-9/11 America. When I saw the title to this piece, my first instinct was that it was satirical. Wrong -- it's supposed to be "patriotic."

Cheney, like Bush, has not forgotten the devastation visited upon this country on September 11, 2001. He has not forgotten that efforts before that date to deal with terrorism resulted in complete and utter failure. He has not forgotten the lessons that we cannot stop people who are bent on our destruction, and have no regard for their own lives or limbs

We cannot stop them? Then why try? And has anyone thought of not welcoming them into the country in the first place?

Sadly, this piece is all too representative of an age where argument consists of screaming platitudes at anyone who disagrees. To be patriotic these days is to demand more power for the Federal government while repudiating the restraints on government power in the Bill of Rights as "protection for terrorists." Because, as this writer claims, the threat of terrorism trumps all concerns about domestic tyranny:

...if anything the Bush Administration has been too muted in explaining to America how serious the threat really is. Far from “fear-mongering,” they seem content to work behind the scenes saving our lives daily while everyone else worries about whether Europe will ever like us again.

Time for a reality check. The documented fact is that terrorism grabs headlines all out of proportion to its actual threat. Consider this from John Mueller:

...the total number of people killed worldwide by genuine al-Qaeda types and assorted wannabes outside of war zones since 9/11 averages about 300 per year. That is certainly 300 a year too many, but that number is smaller than the yearly number of bathtub drownings in the United States. Moreover, unless the terrorists are able somehow massively to increase their capacities, the likelihood that a person living outside a war zone will perish at the hands of an international terrorist over an eighty-year period is about one in 80,000. By comparison, an American’s chance of dying in an auto accident over the same time interval is one in eighty.

So if you want our Lord Protector Dick Cheney to be more effective in watching over us, he should begin monitoring our bathrooms.