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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Is it safe yet?

I don't have any idea what this means, but I'm sure McCain and Obama will explain it all:

Over half of American voters (51%) now believe the United States and its allies are winning the war on terror, the highest figure recorded in nearly four years by Rasmussen Reports in a nationwide survey.

Only 16% now think the terrorists are on top, while 27% view it as a stalemate. Prior to this week's survey, the number who believe the terrorists are winning had never fallen below 20%.

[. . .]

Forty-four percent (44%) of voters think the United States is safer today than before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but 39% disagree. Both figures are roughly comparable to the most optimistic figures on record.

Such numbers could be used by either side of the argument. Either what we're doing is working, and we should do more of it, or the threat isn't what it's cracked up to be, and w

Comments

Bob G.
Wed, 07/23/2008 - 1:14pm

The USA (as a nation) might just BE safer than pre-911, but now, if we discuss being safer ON OUR STREETS within that nation...well, that might just be that horse of a different color, we've heard tell about.
To Oz?
To Oz.

;)

B.G.

Harl Delos
Wed, 07/23/2008 - 2:43pm

Contaminated tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, black olive, jalapeno peppers. Anthrax in the mail. Snipers along the DC beltway. Interstate 35W falling into the Mississippi. A planes flying into a high-rise apartment building in New York. Banks failing left and right.

They surely aren't all terrorist acts, but if any of them were, would they tell us?

Oh, and I forgot. The tigers losing the series in 2006.

gadfly
Wed, 07/23/2008 - 8:34pm

Harl ...

You picked some really big incidents to illustrate our unsafe country. In the 11 years from 1995 through 2006 only two Americans died from contaminated vegetables. The October 2001 Anthrax scare resulted in the death of two postal workers. Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammed killed 10 people with sniper bullets. Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor died in the small plane that crashed into a NY apartment building. Miraculously, the collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis killed only seven.

The biggest tragedy of all was the Pats losing the Super Bowl last year.

Harl Delos
Thu, 07/24/2008 - 3:49am

Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.

So why are you lying, Gadfly?

In the 11 years from 1995 through 2006 only two Americans died from contaminated vegetables.

Are those net numbers? The packaged salad greens that killed 3 in 2006, but there were other vegetables the saved a life, so that the total was 2?

Oops. There were green onions at Chi-Chi's. Another four deaths in 2003.

Or don't those count as vegetables? I haven't begun to check out all the incidents, but your count of two is happenstancially incorrect.

Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammed killed 10 people with sniper bullets.

Tell me, what kind of bullets did they buy to kill the other three people? You're undercounting victims again, but it could be coincidence.

Anthrax scare resulted in the death of two postal workers.

And the other three people who are sleeping very quietly, underground? They don't count, for some enemy reasonable reason?

Miraculously, the collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis killed only seven.

And the rest of the 13 died of old age? Gee, we're past happenstance, coincidence, and enemy action. What do we call this one?

I understand that you're allowed a free shot when it comes to sexual harassment, because it doesn't qualify as harassment until the other party tells you to stop. How many people should die before we consider the situation unsafe. Do you suppose, if you call 9-1-1 and tell them that some guy has killed 7 people, they tell you it's too small to bother with, and if the guy reaches 20 or 30 people, that you should call back?

You claim that Lidle and Stanger were killed in the crash. That's what the gummint is telling us, but is it so? The gummint can't even decide who was behind the controls, but they're sure it was one of those two.

Except that Lidle was flying from Trenton to Tennessee, as the first leg of a trip to California. Seen a map lately? New York City is in the opposite direction. That's sorta like driving from Indianapolis to Orlando, and never getting there, because you wreck the car in Milwaukee.

Were Lidle and Stanger dead before the plane crashed? Was there a suicidal terrorist aboard, flying the plane to NYC instead of Tennessee, to crash into that high-rise building? Was the plane remotely-controlled?

The attack on Iraq was because they were behind 9/11, uh, er, uh, about weapons of mass destruction, er, uh, to depose a dictator that had made Iraq a dangerous place to live. We need to stay in Iraq because we achieved "Mission Accomplished" in 2003, because we don't want to lose the war, because the surge worked and we won the war, or something like that. Osama bin Laden can run, but he can't hide, but he's not really important.

Yeah. The gummint wouldn't lie to us, Gadfly. Just sit quietly and drink your grape Kool-Aid.

Anyhow, if these are all examples of people being safe, what qualifies as an example of someone being unsafe?

In the 11 years from 1995 through 2006 only two Americans died from contaminated vegetables.

Baloney. The 2006 contamination of e. coli killed 3 all by itself.

And it is important that they die? Another 31 got hemolytic uremic syndrome; their kidneys are gone and they'll have to have dialysis the rest of their lives.

The October 2001 Anthrax scare resulted in the death of two postal workers.

The lives of non-postal-workers don't matter?

Robert Stevens died.
Thomas Morris Jr. died.
Joseph Curseen died.
Kathy Nguyen died.
Ottilie Lundgren died.

Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammed killed 10 people with sniper bullets.

They killed 13.

Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor died in the small plane that crashed into a NY apartment building.

Proving that you're s

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