Media paranoia and fearmongering

2011-08-10-Dowd-Christmas-bomber

Withholder in Chief
By MAUREEN DOWD
New York Times Opinion, 2011-08-10

...

[President] Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late.
It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill
and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber;
it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii
to speak about the terrorist incident
when the country was scared about national security,
and then he spent the next week callously shuttling
from the podium to the golf course.

[Perhaps Maureen Dowd was “scared about national security,”
but to say the country was seems a gross overstatement.
The threat from the “would-be Christmas Day bomber”
has yet to harm anyone other than himself.

John Mearsheimer has just released a book, Why Leaders Lie,
which details a number of problems with leaders fearmongering.
Could Dowd be excessively fearmongering too?]