Michael Chertoff should be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.
Did he just admit during the press conference that it never occured to him that explosives could be mixed on an airplane? Give me a break! Any third year chemistry undergrad knows several different ways to unintentionally blow things up. This was made quite clear to me the day that Raymond C. Persick (that obsequious toady) threw away his unquenched sodium sand in a wet sink while he was cleaning his glassware.
The bang was so loud, my ears rang all night.
I've known people who've had presumably benign reactions blow up in their faces. Thank God for safety glasses. My own nerves were shot when my lab partner and I had to cook up potentially unstable ingredients for a lab intermediate.
A clever chemist could probably do real damage.
But what is really stupid about this and the reason I know that Bushco isn't serious about homeland security is that there is nothing to stop this kind of thing from happening on a bus or a train or in WalMart. Why are we focusing so much on planes?
Ooooohhhh, I know. It's because of 9/11. Oh, yes. 9/11 is the definitive terrorist attack. And what did the terrorists use on 9/11 to murder thousands of innocent Americans? Airplanes. Therefore, they get the most scare bang for their buck by putting the nasty evil liquid components on airplanes.
I smell a rat(s).
If there really are terrorists infiltrating our country with plans to mix explosives, why are we restricting ourselves to airplanes Mr. Chertoff? Maybe it's because you can't be everywhere at once. Maybe because then the list of targets would either be so large that the Department of Homeland Security would have to expand exponentially or we would have to learn to live with the possibility of terror in our midst on a daily basis. That would imply that the entire population of the middle east would have to come here and stalk each one of us personally. The only alternative is to kill them all off, an endless, bloody, expensive and impossible task.
So, either we are all in danger every minute of the day or we rationally decide to accept some risk and put our money into securing our country at the points of entry.
But whatever this is about, Mr. Chertoff, I will hold you, Cheney and Bush personally responsible if even one hair on the head of a single American is harmed by a terrorist.
You guys ran on it.
You terrified the American public into voting over it.
You promiised to make us safe and promised to do a better job than the Democrats.
If you don't deliver, it is YOUR fault for starting a conflagration and putting us all at risk and we will hold YOU accountable.