"The point isn't to characterize the Cheneys and other GOP attack dogs as terrorist sympathizers..."

Sure they are. They want to bring down our elected government, same as al Qaeda.

I don't know. I think characterizing the Cheneys and other GOP attack dogs as terrorist sympathizers fits the bill. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The only "enemy" that Cheney and the GOP care about is democrats.

?...inadvertently giving U.S. enemies what they're looking for"? I doubt that it's inadvertent at all.

Bin Laden...Bin Laden...where have I heard that name before?

binLaden is a myth, a media creation.

God damn Dick Cheney's shit-filled soul to hell.

AAAAAHHHHH!!! I'm afraid AAAAHHHHH!!!! I'm wetting my pants AAAAHHHHH!!!! I'm never going to fly again.

Keep Calm and Carry on http://www.keepcalmandcarryon.com/pages/history

If it was good enough for the Brits with bombs falling on thier heads.......

"aiding and providing comfort to our enemies"
hmmm...Where have I heard that before??

Oh, that's right, I heard Cheney say it. Something about "making some terrorist a hero in certain circles". Gee, does this mean we get to try Cheney as a traitor??

The GWOT profits are huge, both for the doers as well as the reactors.

The right wing noise machine is basically a reactor for anything terrorific.

The moment we went into Afghanistan, we took the bait.

The Iraq war was also bait.

Both endeavors, while savory to the MIC, leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

It just isn't feasible to react to terrorist acts with fear-mongering and homeland securitifying up the wazoo.

But there you have it. And, I fear, a very real reason why our economy sucks right now.

The warmongers want us all to GFO.

Labelling the terrorist attack as a success is a shrewd tactical move. It lulls the terrorists into a false sense of complacency. Naturally libberals don't get this.

And this surprises you why? The GWOT was always meant to be the new Cold War, ensuring profits for those who back the GOP and a club to beat anyone who suggests that maybe war and weapons are not the best use for the lion's share of the federal budget. Cheney et al might as well be on the tape with bin Laden -- they all want the same thing.

Are we really sure "Cheney, Kristol and a lot of top Republicans in Washington" are unpaid?

Republicans hate Democrats so much they'd gladly work with al Queda to prove that Dems can't handle al Queda.

Cheney, Kristol and a lot of top Republicans in Washington are acting as unpaid PR agents for al Qaida, trying to turn even its failures into successes.

To be fair, now that the Bush administration has ended they're also spending a lot of time pretending the successful attacks like 9/11 didn't happen at all, except in some sort of parallel time line.

To hear them tell it, Bush and Cheney aren't responsible for failing to stop the actual attacks because they didn't really happen, but Obama is responsible for not stopping the attacks that haven't happened forcefully enough.

The Republicans have shown Al Qaida that further terror attempts, even ludicrous failed attempts, will be used to try to undermine the President and bitterly divide the US. It's like a giant invitation to more attacks.

The Republicans put the "terror" in a guy setting his pants on fire; they will serve the objectives of Al Qaida.

The public didn't overreact to the underpants bomber. The GOP did (which means the kowtowing media had to).
Every time I talk about the underpants bomber, the person across from me smiles. The guy is a joke.

I'm not convinced the attempt failed.

As Keith Olbermann kept saying in the early days, why would someone who wanted the plane to blow up spend 20 minutes in a lavatory where nobody would interrupt him and then return to his seat where plenty of people could interrupt him, if his goal wasn't to have lots of survivors who could report that the explosive was in his underwear?

If there were structural reasons to want the explosion to happen amidships, why didn't he at least take that time to remove the explosive from his underwear so that it would have better access to oxygen during ignition?

The fact is that Richard Reid's failure in 2001, while it dramatically reduced the pain felt by the families of the people on the plane with him, has imposed greater costs on Americans in general than did, say, the Lockerbie bombing, where we don't know the specific mechanism of the attack. And the reason it continues to cost us all is that there were survivors who could say the explosive was in his shoe.

Call it the Khalid the Droll theory: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-19-2006/calvin-trillin

I thought the security system did a pretty good job in foiling this plot. Yes, the intelligence side could have and should have been better at stopping the plot before they got into the air travel system. But the air security system worked, by forcing the plot to use unreliable explosives without detonators, alert passengers were able to catch the guy "in flagrante inferno" trying to light his pants on fire.

Every plot we hear about will have had some degree of success, and every response can be improved. In this case the system was much more successful than not, and not just because of the passengers.

I don't know why Al Queda wants to take credit for this laughably inept attempt.

This would be called treason by Republicans, if Democrats did it. We need tougher slams on them, not Steve B's dorky gentle bromides (relatively speaking.)

"Republicans are cheap. They talked loud but spent soft on terrorism. They let Bin Laden go. Failed to protect our airports. Failed to protect our ports. The dems are improving it, but, One cannot make up for 8 years of nelgect on one year. Shame on the Republicans."

Here's the anti-republican terrorism message.

Why, because once again, another issue going on for a long time which the Repubs have used to pound away at the Admin.

Remember, it really takes five pieces of direct mail before the candidate's name registers in the mind of the voter.

It's the same with political attacks. The same message has to be repeated over and over for it to begin to have an effect.

So now, it time for the Dems to attack the Repubs. Health Care: I still think the "Scrooge" method would work. "Under the Republican plan, Scrooge could deny health care Bob Crstchit, and Tiny Tim would die."

Correction:

So now, it time for the Dems to attack the Repubs. Health Care: I still think the "Scrooge" method would work. "Under the Republican plan to protect big business, Scrooge could deny health care to Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim would die."

REPUBLICANS want Tiny Tim to Die

But general suffering people will not work. The example has to be something everyone knows. A household word.

"Like the Wizard of OZ, the George Bush anti-terrorism plan was impressive on the outside. But all humbug on the inside."

We should be laughing at al Qaeda's puny attempts, not reacting with fear and hysteria.

So JFK was wrong about failure being an orphan !

Dare I say it?

It sounds like they are "emboldening the terrorists."

When you reflect on the recent cheer-leading over "Obama" failures; Copenhagan, Chicago Olympics, pantie bomber, joblessness, Massahowthe fuckdoyouspellchhosets, and the SCOTUS ruling, a picture begins to emerge.

The GOP hate America. They are not with us so they must be against us.

You can't love America and trash it at the same time.

Why weren't the GOP applauding Ft. Hood's catstrophe, for by their rubric, Obama failed there?

Everything everyone's saying here is absolutely correct -- and means little to nothing. These truths are known to us, and to those that already agree with us.
But until and unless a significant number of Democratic leaders and pundits have the wit and gut to actually make such statements, and to do so repeatedly, and in a co-ordinated fashion, to a mass media that will actually report them to the public, it's an academic exercise at best.
I'm really sorry to be such a nattering nabob of negativism, but until we get angry enough, active enough, and organized enough to make them more afraid of us than they are of the Publicans and the paymasters of the Fortune 500, these punks have little incentive to actually fight back.
As for the media....
Well, let me just ask this: how many times over the last few days have you heard / read terms like: "corporations and unions" will now be able to spend freely and directly in political campaigns?
And did you recognize, each and every time you heard it, that it was a huge, and clearly very deliberate, lie on the part of the reporting media entity?
(Because of course "the unions" are mentioned in tandem with the corp's to make it appear that the Dem's will be just as corrupt, with union support, as the Publicans and Blue Dicks are with corporate cash -- when obviously even just a small clot of the corp's have at least three orders of magnitude more money at their disposal than all the "unions" and other Dem-supporting groups combined.)

Now Steve, I think you're giving the Stupid People of America the short end of the stick here. Al's Quesadilla is a highly intricate franchise terrorist organization with locations across the globe, ready to shoe/underpants bomb anything worldwide at any time! Stupid people aren't afraid for no reason whatsoever! Just tap your heels together three times and say "9/11". [My tolerance for stupid people in America is at a frighteningly low reading.]

I'm thinking that Cheney probably admires the attempt as just being in the ball park, given his hunting prowess.