The New Road

How to live in the trans-bay tunnel

Try as I might I couldn't help but think about the best way to survive a bomb explosion in the trans-bay BART tunnel. The tunnel is a three (?) mile stretch that runs below the bay that connects Oakland to San Francisco. I take that tunnel four times a week. Every time I think about what an earthquake would do to it. Today, I thought about what a bomb would do to it.

The Bay Area is a tempting target. The residents are, even more than the rest of the country, against this war. And Al Qaeda likes the war. In fact, it's clear that Osama bin Laden was hoping for a Bush victory. Why? Because the best way to get America out of the Middle East is to get us into the Middle East. We wouldn't ever go into Vietnam again. Similarly, after several more years of the Iraq war it's unlikely that we will ever want to fight in the Middle East again.

So hitting the Bay Area might just stir up the blue state passions towards the war. Or so you would think. Though it appears that in Britain it has not had the effect of rallying people towards the war.

Speaking of that sort of thing. Brit Hume, of Fox News, had an interesting take on yesterdays news. His "initial reaction" was to "buy futures". Frankly, the callousness response to the bombings has left me a little stunned. After 9/11 it was weeks before TV returned to normal. Yesterday's bombings registered little more than a blip on the evening news.

Anyway, I took the same seat as I always do. Which coincidently has the best chance of survival with any accident in the tube. I figure that it's best to either be in the extreme front or rear of the train in either case.

Oh the political beat this morning. Air America has Springer on in the morning, so I couldn't listen to that. And NPR had some, I don't know, silliness on it. So I flipped over to our hard-core rightie station just in time to hear the guy read a letter from a listener.

The letter stated that the terrorists animals (using his words) attacked a society they could never achieve, with technology they could never invent, and hurt innocent people they could never be.

It's a set of statements that are as eloquent as they are stupid. I won't take issue with the society or innocent people statement. That's just bigotry. But the technology statement is as arrogant as it is ignorant. Take the IED situation in Iraq. The technology there has improved rapidly and now the insurgents are taking less casualties and inflicting more damage with each attack. And it's only getting worse. Latest reports have insurgents using lasers targeted from large distances to trigger the devices, thus getting around our electronic dampening. This is sophisticated stuff.

But why is that important, and why did it anger me? It angered me because failing to understand your enemy and their motivations is arrogant and stupid. It's the kind of statement that is made by someone who doesn't understand how to fight effectively. What's even worse is that it's a statement that is said with pride. As if it's important that we don't understand the enemy. That understanding is somehow empathy.

The righties are in complete control but are so out of touch that they can't understand, or don't want to understand what is happening on the ground, and good people are dying for that ignorance and arrogance.