Annoyance of the day: Bellyaching about terrorists

All this heated agitation about the failure of the government to protect us from terrorists on airplanes is annoying. Is anyone else pretty relieved by what has been revealed in the past couple of airline terrorist attack attempts? Consider the following examples:

Case 1: A well funded, well trained organization spends a full year planning every last detail of an attack. They find a non-Arab attacker, and successfully get him a US travel visa. Everything goes right for them at the airport, and the guy gets on the plane. What’s the problem? He could only sneak enough explosive onto the airplane to incinerate his own junk. The airplane and the passengers were never in danger.

Case 2: A pretty active splinter group spends all sorts of time devising a bomb that fits inside a shoe. The guy makes it onto the airplane with it, but cannot detonate the device before being restrained. However, nearly every expert agrees that such a device was nowhere near large enough to disable a commercial jetliner. Again, the worst he could have done is perhaps hurt a few of the people around him, and you will never stop people from being able to do that.

Do I wish our intelligence officers had picked these guys up earlier? Of course. Would I be happy sitting next to the idiot that just melted his testicles or blew his damn foot off? Of course not. But I’m also pretty excited that the worst either of these organizations could have done, even if their plans had been executed flawlessly, would be to cause some non-fatal commotion.

I feel better about airline safety than I did before these “attacks.” Stop yo’ bellyachin’!