Terror Plot to Blow Up Disney World!! Details at 11

Terror headlines on the local news stations, FOX, CNN, The New York Post, and other tabloids will be appearing more frequently as the year-end elections for the Senate and House approach and as the President's poll numbers plummet.

It's roundup the usual suspects time!

The Department of Homeland Security is surely playing a number of terrorist groups via informants and FBI moles. Most of these groups are obvious wannabees and have no real contact with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. They have no bombs, or money or other materials to carry out terrorist plans. Theirs is a homegrown terrorism, nurtured and carefully cultivated by agents, moles, and FBI instigators.

There is never a shortage of disenfranchised psychos, street corner thugs, big mouths, posturing teenagers, extremist Muslims, and Christian fundamentalist sects, anybody who has been to an Arab country in the Middle East. Target any ghetto or high school in the country and you can come up with all the "terrorists" you want.

It's very simple. Send in an informant, promise planes, monies, cell phones, guns and shoes and you can manufacture terrorists by the busloads.

The principles are the same as in military recruitment. Go to the playgrounds, the basketball courts in Liberty City, Watts, South Bronx or Bedford Stuyversant. Guarantee the disenfranchised and disillusioned a way out, a goal, a group mission, money, and virgins.

An always festering pool of resentment lies in the Secret Service computer files of ten thousand whackos that send threatening letters to the President and post bomb making instructions on the internet. All these guys would love to be part of a good plot.

Then, when the President's poll numbers need a boost, when he needs to prove that he's doing something to protect the nation, the White House can quickly trot out one of these carefully nurtured terrorist cells, make arrests, have a big news conference. Show pictures of the "desperate" terrorists. Reveal scary plans - bomb the LA airport, the Superdome, the Pentagon. Have blowups of the intended targets. Tip off the networks so that local residents will be interviewed live on Fox and CNN. The Attorney General will congratulate the FBI.

If questioned, the Attorney General can respond as he did last week, "we realize that these plans are more aspirational than operational but it's good that we stopped them now."

This is all good fun and games - sells newspaper, drives up ratings on local stations and the all-news TV networks - but the worst part of these public relations stunts is that they divert agents from finding real terrorists in our midst. Our ports are still unmonitored for radioactive materials. Our public transportation system is embarrassingly vulnerable and we have few trained Arab-speaking agents who can penetrate real terrorist cells. And we have way too few overseas intelligence operatives.

Don't worry about the preposterousness of the plans. A fiction that gets repeated so many times becomes its own reality. Look, their pictures are on television. They have guns! Sadly, most of the recent terrorism arrests have been set pieces, pulled up at will by Republican spinmiesters to bolster the President's poll rankings. It's just part of the political arsenal; good visuals rank up there with surprise 24 hour visits to Baghdad and jogging on the White House track with an Iraqi War veteran who has lost a leg.

What allows this transparent strategy to work is the acquiescing and complacent mainstream media, which is an all-too-willing accomplice. Such dramatic news drives up the ratings, like a good hurricane, and brings in more ads and profits. So what if it creates a climate of fear and scares the bejesus out of the public?

Protecting us from terror is the only issue where the Republicans have an advantage over the Democrats. So, until the elections this fall are over, brace yourselves, it's going to be Terror! Terror! Terror! All the time...