What real panic looks like
Wish I'd said that!
[Reprinted from Issues & Views August 9, 2004]
In "The dumbest idea of the season" ( Washington Times, 7/13/04), Wesley Pruden reflects on the now-defunct (perhaps?) suggestion to consider postponing November's elections. "Some ideas are dumber than others," he writes, "and the dumbest of the season is percolating somewhere in the bowels of the government." Here are excerpts of his further ruminations:
Responsible governments make contingency plans for all sorts of unlikely events; somewhere deep inside the Pentagon there are no doubt contingency plans for invading Scotland or repelling an invasion by a fearsome axis of drivel (France, Monaco and San Marino). But woe to the brigadier or bureaucrat who talks about it. The idea of postponing the November elections, nutty though it may be, was apparently hatched by the Rev. DeForest B. Soaries Jr., a Baptist clergyman in New Jersey. He is the chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. . . . .
We certainly expect official Washington to react to threats and terror in a way that "Mount Rushmore," i.e., the rest of the country, would not. Congress showed us what real panic looks like when parties unknown sprinkled a few grains of anthrax about the Capitol: The photographs of congressional leaders knocking each other out of the way, scrambling down the Capitol steps, hurrying to be first in line at the airport, told it all. The White House closed off Pennsylvania Avenue in the name of security, making it a parking lot for the Secret Service bodyguards even before September 11. Courage in the face of lethal conflict is for the 19-year-old kids we send to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Doesn't everyone know how important we are in Washington? . . . .
Maybe this was the dumb idea of only one naïve and well-intentioned man. Or maybe not. The nature of security men is to shut down everything for the convenience of perfect security. But the security men don't run the country. Not yet.
Copyright © 2008 Issues & Views
|
|
