SALON

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 1:05 PM UTC

Fox News does the Times Square freak-out

No need to hand the bomber a victory that he didn't earn

By

Topics: Times Square Bomb Attempt, War Room, Fox News, Janet Napolitano, Media Criticism, New York City, Rudy Giuliani, Terrorism, Islam,

A lot of the time, complaints about the politicization of tragedies consist of empty sanctimony. When people say, “Don’t politicize this,” they usually just mean, “Don’t disagree with me about how to politicize this.” Even a natural occurrence like Hurricane Katrina has profoundly political aspects — as David Simon puts it in his new show “Treme,” the disaster was in some sense man-made, even if the storm wasn’t. Terrorism, of course, is inherently political: it’s violence designed to produce a political outcome. Hence, there’s no way not to respond to it politically. The question is just how.

So I don’t begrudge the folks over at Fox News their right to ask questions in the wake of the attempted bombing in Times Square. However, I do begrudge the Fox crew the inane questions they’ve chosen to ask. (Hat tip to Media Matters on this.)

Interviewing Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Fox and Friends hosts tried to elicit a characterization of the incident as terrorism. Napolitano, who called it a “potential terrorist attack” – perhaps not wanting to taint a future jury — didn’t satisfy their jonesing for the magic word, in its pure, unmodified state. Later on, host Gretchen Carlson said to guest Rudy Giuliani,

We just interviewed though, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, who refuses to say the word terror. Is this a mandate within the Obama administration, not saying the word terror … the reason I ask the question, Mr. Mayor, is because if you have an administration that does not want to say the word terror, then how the heck do you fight terrorism?

Likewise, Fox legal analyst Peter Johnson delivered a melodramatic monologue, asking, “Are we safer now than we were nine years ago, or have officials lost their way … Are we sleeping while the enemy plans? … Is the Department of Homeland Security protecting you?”

First of all it seems worth noting that the area around the bomb was evacuated, the bomb squad showed up, and no explosion happened. Then, the guy was arrested. So the answer to Carlson’s and Johnson’s questions would seem to be that, in fact, the government is perfectly capable of protecting us and fighting terrorism. That’s at least where the facts seem to point in the Times Square case.

Nor is it in any way obvious what the vocabulary of government officials has to do with anything at all, when there isn’t any complaint with their conduct. You know, the stuff they actually did. The fact that some guy tried to set off a badly-designed bomb is in no way evidence of government negligence. “This story sure is a series of close calls,” says the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. That’s the best you guys can come up with? By that standard, every time officials foil a terrorist attack beyond its initial stages, it’s a sign that they’re blowing it and leaving us unprotected. Really, the mind boggles at this logic.

It’s just not that hard to do terrible things to innocent people. We see this all the time, and the fact that would-be terrorists so often blow it is mainly a sign of their relative weakness and incompetence. But it’s also evidence that anything beyond the planning stages is really going to be, as Lopez puts it, “a close call,” and we should count ourselves lucky that there aren’t more catastrophic events, rather than grab at whatever argument we can, no matter how implausible, to use as a cudgel against politicians we don’t like.

But alas, there’s also a nonsensical attempt to use this attack as part of the complaint against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. Says Fox’s Steve Doocy, “New York is always a target.” So does it really make sense “to have the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial and the other terrorists done right here at this big target?” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. echoes him. “This trial should be taken out of New York; it should be announced immediately. What Attorney General Eric Holder is doing is just really fighting here for a left wing ideology.” (King is also inexplicably outraged that Holder is exercising independence as attorney general, and calls for the president to subjugate the prosecutorial arm of the government to his will.)

Look, terrorists aren’t like gnats attracted to a light. They’re not just getting pulled around to various targets depending on how much attractive stuff we pile up there. What conservatives freaking out over this have failed to grasp is that terrorism is strategic. They go after available targets to try to produce political outcomes that will benefit their cause. If New York is, as Doocy says, “always a target,” then it’s probably not going to make a difference where Mohammed is tried. Rather more to the point, we can’t really predict what will motivate any given attack. It’s just not that hard for some militant to pick up a gun or strap on a bomb and go. The fact that it doesn’t happen that much is not evidence of a terrifying secret plot in the making. What it shows is that as a rule, we’re pretty safe, and can’t really expect to predict too well the exceptions to that rule. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to descend into utter terror every time some nasty character bungles a car bomb and gets busted at the airport.

Some on the right would like to take advantage of this moment to declare race war. (See Mark Steyn at the National Review, claiming that the government is insufficiently suspicious of “guy[s] with a name like Mohammed,” and Rev. Franklin Graham declaring, “Muslims are getting a pass.”) Panicking and declaring race war seems like exactly the response that terrorism is meant to elicit, so let’s perhaps all just chill out. We busted the would-be bomber. Why give him what he wanted now?

Gabriel Winant is a graduate student in American history at Yale. More Gabriel Winant.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 56 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations