Manufacturing consent by reselling terror
posted by Rick at 8:01 AM

The Ostroy Report has a summary of a Keith Olbermann piece showing the alarming correlation between bad political news for the Bush administration and subsequent terror alerts.

As Olbermann points out, there is a danger here of a logical fallacy called post hoc, ergo propter hoc: just because one event follows another doesn't mean there's a causal relationship. However, we should also be mindful of Occam's Razor: given a sizable set of facts, the simplest theory that explains them all tends to be the most likely.

You don't suppose these people would manipulate the fear of terror for political gain, do you?

Yeah, me too.

The good news is that it appears not to be working so well anymore. In fact, Bush's approval rating has dipped to an all-time low. The bad news is that this is such bad news for Bush, they're likely to try to terrify us again. In fact, I'm declaring a terror alert alert right now. I'd say conditions are such that the terror alert risk level stands at Orange. It's highly likely that within the next few days, the administration will announce some new threat to our republicans - er, aherm, republic - to take our minds off of their incompetence and corruption.

And if that doesn't work, they may resort to more desperate measures.