Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I’m going to steal two Josh Marshall posts. First the relevant links: Link & Link. It struck me, sitting at work today, that if you reversed the order of these two posts, the picture would be quite telling, so here goes.

1. Uh-oh …

   Kerry over Bush 50% to 46% among likely voters in the new AP/Ipsos poll.

2. AP: “The Education Department has advised school leaders nationwide to watch for people spying on their buildings or buses to help detect any possibility of terrorism like the deadly school siege in Russia. The warning follows an analysis by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department of the siege that killed nearly 340 people, many of them students, in the city of Beslan last month. ‘The horror of this attack may have created significant anxiety in our own country among parents, students, faculty staff and other community members,’ Deputy Education Secretary Eugene Hickok said in a letter to schools and education groups … The Education Department sent its letter by e-mail Wednesday to school police, state school officers, school boards, groups representing principals and many other organizations.” (emphasis added)

To be fair, I’m not at all sure which story hit first. I’ll just say it seems to fit a pattern.

A word about the warning from the Education Department. My wife is a public school teacher. This particular exercise in paranoia is aimed at people like my wife, her students, their parents and…well me. It’s really pretty effective stuff. My paranoia level went up a bit when I read it. Let me say this though, in any halfway decent school district, the teachers, administrators, and support staff have been watching out for suspicious persons since the advent of child abuse. As a matter of fact, they have been trained to do so and it is a part of their jobs. You can also assume that Columbine upped the level of awareness by more than a little.

So what’s the point here? No new strategy for keeping schools safe has been offered, no new programs seem to be in the offing, no specific threat outlined, and the only strategy advised is one that is already in place.

How about securing our ports guys?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2004 at 9:21 pm and is filed under I'm not sure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.