"I have a list of known communists..."

I couldn't help thinking of the McCarthy quote when I heard the President, in his BOOGA BOOGA scare speech yesterday, claim that we had foiled 10 Al Qaeda attacks since September 11. I guess it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome for me: after all the talk of WMD, all the talk of how great things are going in Iraq, how nobody could have anticipated a breach of the levees, I strain to accept what's coming out of the guy's mouth at face value.

Well, here's something from my local paper:

The White House later issued a list of the foiled plots, citing potential Sept. 11-style airliner attacks on both coasts, a plan to blow up apartment buildings and surveillance of gas stations, bridges and tourist sites nationwide. But several senior law enforcement officials interviewed later questioned whether many of the incidents on the list constituted an imminent threat to public safety and said that authorities had not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And that was really the only new thing in this "major" speech. The rest was a rehashing of the same platitudes about "the evildoers," the same equating of Iraq with Al Qaeda, the same syllogisms, the same everything. Some have questioned the timing of this speech, given on the same day that Karl Rove decided to return to the grand jury in the Plame case, and in the face of lagging support for the White House. The speech was planned for quite a while, and it coincides with the referendum on the Iraqi constitution. If anything, Rove's decision to return may have been coincided with the speech, not the other way around.

And of course, we did get another TERRA ALERT!!! yesterday, but Homeland Security is playing that down while the NYPD is playing it up. I do know that the NYPD has such a large counterterrorism operation that I'd tend to believe them more. And, their mayor is in the midst of an election, so it could be a parallel phenomenon. Still, the fact that terror chatter bubbled to the surface the same day that the White House was poised to take a major hit was not lost on everyone:

OLBERMANN: Remarkably enough, Karl Rove's possible legal problems were bookended by two pieces of terror news.  Before, came a presidential speech on the war on terror.  After, came a supposed terrorist threat to New York's subway system.

Stop what you're thinking.  It is just an amazing coincidence.  The terrorists just happened to wait to make these threats until there's bad news about the administration that it needs to preempt.  Just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, 6 more Marines have died today for this war based on the bumper sticker logic of yesterday's speech. At least they died with the solace of knowing they were fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here at home. Except in the New York City subway system.