Our mania about terrorism reached a crescendo with the Boston Marathon bombings, where a couple of disaffected young men with little or nothing in the way of military training (or common sense) were the focus of a massive manhunt that shut down a major city for a day.
As Maher said in the clip:
After 9/11 we were shell shocked. We didn't know what kind of enemy we were dealing with, but twelve years later, we have a much better idea: Losers, fuckups, idiots!
...
Bin Laden's plan wasn't to kill us all. It was to scare us into overreacting, and destroy ourselves. Because if there's one thing those terrorists proved they can blow up, it's our balance sheet.
I've mentioned this thought before, but bin Laden succeeded brilliantly. The best thing we could have done to persuade them to try something else would have been to, as the old British war posters said, "Keep calm and carry on". Instead, we reacted like Daffy Duck on his first hit of methamphetamine. Not only did our reaction encourage more efforts from the more-or-less professional terrorists, but it showed the losers that this was one sure-fire way of getting attention.
Nothing about this recent bombing gives me hope that we'll be getting over it anytime soon.
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