When Cowards Rule, America Loses

When Cowards Rule, America Loses
By DOUG THOMPSON
May 13, 2005, 08:05

When, exactly, did America turn into a nation of frightened, over-reactive sissies?

How is it the country that runs the most deadly military on the face of the earth can act like the Keystone Kops when a couple of navigation-challenged pilots in a single-engine Cessna wander off course?

Have we become such a country of cowards that the slightest, unexplained event can send us running from buildings and hiding in terror?

Apparently so. This week, the government of the most powerful nation in the world evacuated the White House and the Capitol because a private plane with two dimwits at the helm ventured into DC airspace.

Last month, a flight of geese spooked a radar operator in Washington and Secret Service agents rushed the President and Vice President to “secure locations.” It’s a sad state of affairs when terrorist geese can cause America to pee in its collective shorts.

The clockers and watchers who monitor the state of things in the world often talk abut the “mood of the country.” If America has a mood today, it’s a paranoid one, driven by fear, lunacy and outright cowardice....

....America is vulnerable because our efforts are wasted on political expendiency, not security. Our leaders pander to fear, not logic. We waste our resources, and American lives, half a world away on a war that had nothing to do with the attack on our nation while our enemies are free to regroup and plan anew.

When another terrorist attack comes, as it surely will, it won’t be from a Cessna flying in open skies into the waiting clutches of American fighter planes. It will come in a way we least expect it, exploiting a vulnerability we haven’t discovered and corrected because we were far too busy overreacting to perceived threats that didn’t exist.

Cowards make mistakes and when a nation like America is run, and controlled by, cowards, those mistakes make it all to easy for our enemies to use those mistakes to kill us.