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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (198396)	10/31/2001 11:53:28 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769670

Squawking Heads This just in: The sky is falling. BY THOMAS J. BRAY Tuesday, October 30, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST The FBI insists that there is a 100% probability of another major terrorist action on U.S. soil. There may be a large element of pre-emptive tail-covering in such statements, but a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll suggests that 91% of Americans agree. In the precincts I inhabit, however, there seems to be remarkably little evidence of panic--or even a very high level of personal concern--about the possibility of new attacks. People may be flying less and inspecting their mail more closely, but in the main they are doing just as President Bush suggested: going about their daily business. Nearly 90% of those surveyed in the NBC/WSJ poll, conducted in early October, say that taking up arms against the terrorists is worth it even if it risks further attacks on America. Yet the hysterical all-anthrax-all-the-time coverage misses this reaction. Indeed, there seem to be two Americas emerging--one obsessed by risk, the other learning to adjust to new realities. On the one side are politicians, bureaucrats and media people, who seem to be verging on hysteria. On the other are the vast majority of average Americans who get up every day, go to work, eat their lunch and don't cancel their trips to Chicago, Florida or Italy. If you live in Washington or New York and work in a congressional or media mailroom, of course, you are likely to have a much different threat perception than somebody who lives in Oshkosh. But even around my hometown of Detroit, which is home to one of the biggest Islamic communities of Arab origin outside the Middle East--leading to a flurry of press speculation about possible terrorist links--there doesn't seem to be the same sense of dread that comes spilling out of the TV set every time you turn it on. Part of the disparity may be explained by media bias, theorizes Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. Mr. Smith has long written and spoken on the media's overreaction to environmental risks. And he sees the media's highly selective aversion to risk at work in the anthrax scare. "When the meat industry was proposing to use low-level radiation to sanitize meat supplies, the environmentalists and their sympathizers in the press went crazy," says Mr. Smith. "When government proposes to use irradiation as a means of sanitizing the mail, you don't hear anything" about the supposed risk. Mr. Smith cites the work of the late Aaron Wildavsky, the noted University of California political scientist who studied risk. Wildavsky, who once headed the American Political Science Association, ascribed the modern aversion to risk, or at least to certain kinds of risk, to a "dramatic rise in the power of radical egalitarians--that is, those who see all differences among the citizenry as evidence of injustice." Nowhere does this sense of injustice burn more brightly than in the media. The media are strongly suspicious of the capitalistic process of "creative destruction" that goes hand in hand with economic and technological change. Such change creates losers as well as winners, after all, and thus leads to "unfairness." Likewise, the media have been hammering hard on the supposed unfairness of providing Cipro to congressional staffers while letting postal workers go unprotected. Yet there is not a shred of evidence that class warfare, much less race, was at work here. The decision to test the mail recipients first was based on the entirely rational theory that postal workers wouldn't be infected by contact with sealed envelopes. Once that theory turned out to be wrong, authorities instantly started pouring massive resources into protecting postal employees and facilities. And the media have given scant attention to the bigger picture: that the anthrax attacks have largely failed. So far only three people out of scores exposed have been killed--a reason for public outrage, but hardly cause for panic. Worse could lie ahead, of course, but throwing money wildly at every presumed risk could prove not only useless but counterproductive. As Wildavsky often pointed out, the most effective antidote to risk is a healthy, wealthy--and thus highly resilient--society that can adjust to the unexpected. A society that spends its time and money chasing phantom risks will have little left over to deal with an actual risk when it materializes. The terrorists have already shown their ability to strike where least expected. Fortunately the average American seems to be taking apocalypse with a grain of salt. The level of risk may have gone up, but that level is better measured by the relative public calm than the Condit-type coverage on display in much of the media. Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays. opinionjournal.com

To: gao seng who wrote (198396)	11/1/2001 9:02:09 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

has compared the Rev. Falwell to the Taliban. Right on! Fundamentalists here, Afganistan, Israel, and elsewhere are the real foundation of terror. It's time that Falwell lost his tax exemption for making idiotic remarks. TP

To: gao seng who wrote (198396)	11/1/2001 9:21:19 AM
From: Bald Eagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

RE:the left's entire contribution to the war effort thus far has been to whine. Ain't that the truth. We have some prime examples here on this thread.