Today we are all Londoners. Tomorrow it might Angelenos. The threat to California and Los Angeles could not be more real or more apparent. If one or more sleeper cells were able to get into and operate out of London then why shouldn’t we expect the same to be happening in California (and I’m not just talking about Lodi)? How are Californians and our elected officials dealing with the threat? Unfortunately, not very well.

• Jerry Brown is running for Attorney General and his only references to terrorism relate to the threats to civil liberties resulting from the fight against terrorism.
• The ACLU wants to neuter or eliminate the Patriot Act–an extremely important set of tools for dealing with today’s terrorists.
• California Senator Barbara Boxer also wants to neuter the Patriot Act. Furthermore, she’s against coercive interrogation of illegal combatants, against the war in Iraq, and opposes just about every other anti-terror measure in the US arsenal.
• Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger voiced his support for a citizens movement to tighten the country’s notoriously porous border and is called irresponsible and is attacked by the state’s Democrats and left leaning papers like the Los Angeles Times.
• Antonio Villaraigosa (newly elected mayor of the largest city in the state) gives one of the longest inauguration speeches in history covering everything from summer school to traffic but the subject of terrorism or disaster preparation didn’t rank important enough to be included.
• On a national level, politicians and others with a goal of derailing the current administration are doing everything they can to position the the Gitmo detainees as victims of fanatical Republican aggression.

Let’s not forget that LAX was almost blown up not five years ago and the golden state contains many, many other natural targets. Why can’t our politicians treat this with the level of importance and focus necessary? Even if we aren’t focused, our enemy is.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 9:14 pm by Insider and is filed under California Schemin', Nemesises ... Nemesi?, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.