Surely they're not lying this time

"You're all trying to destroy me!"

In "Unreasoning hysteria as the default condition," Arthur Silber offers some hilarious, insightful, and ultimately just sad commentary on the latest "fearsome plot that might have, maybe, perhaps, in some other world subject to significantly different scientific laws, resulted in the Destruction of All the Universes for All Time Forevermore The End Period (and You and Everyone You Know Will Be Dead, Too!)."

It's been four days after the big announcement that Muslim Terrorists Were Prevented from Blowing Up JFK Airport, so the drill is a familiar one. After a couple of days in which mainstream sources were wetting themselves in the fear and titillation of yet another Evil Plot Foiled, we all know now that the truth wasn't quite so exciting. The "plan" wasn't exactly "operational"--in fact it was "less than mature," according to the Times, and once again, there was a critical, highly motivated informant in the middle of it all ("a convicted drug trafficker, ... his sentence ... pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government." Hmm.)

As Scott Horton puts it in "I don’t believe ‘em for a second":

Every time this happens, it turns out that the whole damn thing was either made up by the state out of thin air, the idea to do something violent came from the undercover FBI informant or the “truth” was tortured out of the guy.

There’s no al Qaeda in America. As always, the biggest threat to our lives and liberties is the national government of the United States. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.

Partial list of bogus domestic terrorism plots “busted” by the Federal Cops since 9/11 (all the false warnings are too numerous to mention.):

• Lackawanna Six
• Detroit
• Virginia Paintball guys
• The tortured Abu Ali
• Jose Padilla
• Lodi, California
• Miami plot against the Sears Tower
• New York subway tunnels
• New York subway station
• “Liquid explosives” plot on UK to US flights
• Ft. Dix Six

But, I’m so sure we can believe them when they tell us to be frightened about a plot at JFK!

What, just because there has not been a single case where they have actually busted domestic terrorists since 9/11?! Surely they’re not lying this time!

Anyway, what a surprise, eh? A plot not what it was drummed up to be.

But not everyone views such Keystone Cops routines with the same degree of skepticism, if any. In fact, there are people out there who jump on every one of these silly cases (not entirely silly, since "enhanced interrogation" and long, Kafkaesque stretches in various prisons are surely in store for the plotters), as proof--proof once again--that "Muslim men" are trying to KILL US ALL. Or as Andrew McCarthy (no, not THAT Andrew McCarthy) put it in the National Review Online, the JFK "plot" is more proof that

War is about breaking the enemy's will. Having laid bare the sorry state of our brains and our guts, jihadists are now zeroing in on the will's final piece: our hearts.

.... They know there's a war out there. Not just Iraq or Afghanistan, but Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb — jihadists versus civilization. Global. For us to win, it will not be enough to stabilize Baghdad, sow democracy and empower moderates. It's about breaking the enemy's will, as they are working feverishly to break ours.

That "abject, ludicrously disproportionate hysteria" is what Silber's talking about when he references an apt monologue from "the climactic breakdown in a genuinely awful Joan Crawford melodrama, after Crawford has slurped up five quarts of cheap scotch and can now only burble incoherently:

You're all trying to destroy me! You're all against me, you bastards! You broke my heart, and now you want to kill me! But I won't let you, do you hear me? I won't let you! I'm going to live, damn you, I'm going to LIVE!

At which point, the sobbing, screaming, disheveled, thoroughly pathetic Ms. Crawford falls to the floor in a dead faint, completely undone by her own self-willed and self-created histrionics.

Silber doesn't entirely play this for cheap laughs, merited though they are. He examines the underlying "psychological disturbance" of ejaculations like McCarthy's, and comes around to discussing Robert Jay Lifton's thoughts on "superpower syndrome" and its oh-so-fragile underlying psychology. He also, interestingly, brings the voice of Cho Seung-Hui into the mix and concludes

It is the perspective and the policies offered by people with views like McCarthy's that have brought us to where we are today, just as they were a crucial part of what led to 9/11. Now, as the solution which will save the United States, the world, and all the universes unto eternity, they demand that we eliminate every conceivable enemy for all time, that we rearrange other countries around the globe as we determine is required on the basis of our sole unappealable judgment, and that we impose our will on all of creation.

As I have said before, their belief system reduces very simply to this:

America is God. God's Will be done.

But that is not the solution, McCarthy. That, and you, are the problem, and a very terrible one it is -- and not just for us, but for the entire world.

Read the entire piece...

Update: Nora Ephron's How to foil a terrorist plot in seven simple steps is a very funny take on all of this. Not to give it away, but here are steps 3 through 5:

3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material -- a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States -- you can make your very own terrorist.

4. Now the good part begins. Money! The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible targets and weapons that might be used in the impending terrorist attack that your very own terrorist is going to mastermind, with your help. It will even buy you a computer so you can go to Google Earth in order to show your very own terrorist a "top secret" aerial image of the target you have suggested.

5. More money!! The FBI will give you even more money to travel to foreign countries with your very own terrorist, and it will make suggestions about terrorist groups you can meet while in said foreign countries.

Read the whole thing...