Monday, January 11, 2010

The Right Way

I love Fareed Zakaria. I agree with him about half the time, but he's always on-point. As far as I know, he's never advocated for the United States' Congress to spend time talking about the NCAA Bowl Championship selection.

In a recent WaPo column Zakaria references the recent al-Qaeda crotch bomber and our response to that event:


Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later a senior State Department official in the Bush administration, suggests that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airplane catastrophes. When an airliner suffers an accident, major or minor, the National Transportation Safety Board convenes a group of nonpartisan experts who methodically examine what went wrong and then issue recommendations to improve the situation. "We approach airline security with the understanding that it's a complex problem, that we have a pretty good system, but that there will be failures -- caused by human beings, technology, or other factors. The point is to constantly fix what's broken and keep improving the design and execution," says Zelikow.

It's hard to argue that terrorism is designed to change what we do. The crotch bomber was successful because we've talked about him. Can't we just measure James Carville's penis* and get on with our lives?



* Speaking of Mr Carville, I have for years maintained that he is the most entertaining person on TV. I firmly stand by that position.