With the approach of Super Bowl Sunday, talking heads are out on TV to handicap and cash in politically on the biggest game of all–a terror attack on American soil.
The latest skirmish pits Sen. Kit Bond, ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, against White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who took exception to Bond’s flogging the notion that release of information that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is cooperating with questioners “has no doubt been helpful” to his “terrorist cohorts around the world.”
The White House is underscoring Bond’s desperation to find political profit in the terror threat, at first objecting to “Mirandizing” the would-be Christmas bomber from providing leads and then switching to criticism of news that he is doing so, a fact that Gibbs points out was revealed at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s public hearing earlier this week.
This squabbling reflects the ugly undertone of using primal fears as just another political weapon to tear down the President as “tone-deaf” to terrorism, reducing the most complicated issue of national security to a counterpart of the nonsense of claims that he wants “a government takeover” of health care.