The President Who Cried Wolf

This is mainly to alert you to the post yesterday by Larry C. Johnson over at The Huffington Post (Johnson being one who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism) about Dubya and his abuse of the terror warning system for political purposes. I realize this is not new stuff, but Johnson links to a presentation by Keith Olbermann on this subject that is absolutely spot-on.

By the way, Glenn Reynolds, among others, made some typically dumb remark at about the time that the story of the British terrorism plot involving the planes broke that “(I wonder) if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.”

I meant to link here earlier to refute this stupid notion (from Atrios), but this is as good a time as any to do so (and by the way, Josh Marshall has more here).

Update: Actually, as James K. Galbraith of The Nation points out here, the recent British plane scare may actually turn out to be number 11 on Olbermann's list, though it's too early to tell; Paul Craig Roberts raised doubts about this a few days ago also (huge hat tip to Brandoland).