John Kerry said that the threat of terrorism had been overstated, so I guess that means that everything is safe. /sarcasm off.
but the first responders need to make $100K+ per year and retire after 20 years with full pensions - just to make sure we are all safe from the overstated threat of terrorism.
Well, there's nothing that's impossible to overstate.
The threat from the Japanese was overstated after World War II began....despite the bloody attack on Pearl Harbor and the long war that followed.
After PH every US magazine and newspaper, including all the respectable ones, were filled with lurid maps and diagrams about how the Japanese were going to invade the West Coast and what routes they'd take. People were sighting the Japanese invasion fleet off the West coast dozens of times every night. (I consider this a pretty fair parallel to all the "50 suitcase nukes already in the US" nonsense.)
Turns out the Japanese never had any plan to do so; in fact, they never even DISCUSSED it, ever, as it was so obviously impossible. They barely had the beginnings of a plan to invade Hawaii, but never even considered it.
A couple of Japanese subs lobbed a few small shells at California refineries, and there was a Rube Goldberg attempt to float incendiary bombs to the US with ballons (which actually managed to kill a couple people.) That was it.
I actually don't feel the Bush Administration has overstated the terror threat at all. There could be a pretty bad attack tomorrow, or next month.
But certainly there are people who have. This will cause the Threat Matrixers to soil themselves in paroxysms of rage, but I'm sorry, there aren't tens of thousands of AQ sleeper agents in the US. It's totally inconsistent with the number of attacks in the US. One of them can't even motivate himself to make a belt bomb and blow himself up in a mall? If someone on Sep. 12th 2001 had posted on this board that in the next 2 1/2 years the sum total of US attacks and attempts would be the shoe bomber (technically not in the US but in a plane headed there) and then the LAX airport ticket counter shooter and the snipers (both with dubious-to-non-existent actual AQ connections) you would have been viciously flamed and/or laughed at.
And the main threat in the US to my mind is the plain ol' truck bomb. I'd welcome AQ spending time, money, and effort on dirty bombs or chemicals as opposed to regular explosives (if those are the only two choices, of course, my first choice would be for no attacks at all) as they'll kill a heck of a less people with dirty bombs or chemical weapons than explosives, given the same level of funding, manpower, and time.