In the continuing war on terra, it appears that the evil doers have come up with another angle - tourist helicopters in NYC. Now, I'm not quite sure where this one came from. And even if a bad guy was able to catch a ride on a tourist-enabled Bell 206-L4, it's unclear how much actual damage any helicopter could cause by crashing into a big building.
What's that, you say? What about the suitcase nuke a latter-day Mohammed Atta could smuggle onboard? Or the automatic weapons they could train on an unsuspecting crowded Times Square? Or the anthrax they could distribute via the whirling blades of a chopper.
Come on, people, let's get real here. The possibility plays well in Liberal, Kansas. Hell, in about an hour, all three cable news channels are carrying a press conference from the big dogs in NYC (Bloomberg, the police chief, and I'm sure Ridge is chomping at the bit to fly in...). It'll lead the news on the major networks tonight.
Realistically? Come on. I mean, really. This whole whirlybird thing brings me back to one of my all time favorite lead-up bullshit lines to the invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq:
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that would be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using the UAVs for missions targeting the United States." -- Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.And in a day or two, we'll find out (in the words of the band "Green Day"), it was all a bunch of Dookie. (Thanks to Sean for correcting the geezer.)
