Paging Big Brother

You know, I thought it was a little suspicious two years ago, when Big Dick Cheney kicked off the election season by tellling Americans that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for bin Ladin. And I admit that my spider sense tingled a little when, with just three months to go until the midterms, another terror plot was uncovered. But now even conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan is saying that the whole thing looks fishy. Money quote

So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed imminent. Forgive me if my skepticism just ratcheted up a little notch... If the only evidence they have was from torturing someone in Pakistan, then they have nothing that can stand up in anything like a court. I wonder if this story is going to get more interesting. I wonder if Lieberman's defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn't find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.
Been there. Done that. Learned my lesson.

Note to morons: Neither Sully or I are saying that there was no plot. We're just thinking that maybe it wasn't quite necessary for the whole world to go on full alert. We're saying that maybe Bush's homeland security boys steped in for political reasons. I mean have you noticed that something always seems to happen whenever Bush can use a little bounce? And yes, I'll concede that Clinton and Nixon played the same game. If memory serves, US planes bombed Bosnia at around the same time Clinton was called in front of the grand jury, and Nixon went to DefCon 3 to divert attention from Watergate. The difference is that there's every indication that the GOP plans to cynically use this "war on terror" in every way they can for as long as they can, and frankly I've had enough.