These boots were made for terrorizin’.

So, I haven’t posted anything on the big bust of seven guys in Florida who had a “plan to ‘kill all the devils we can,’ including blowing up Chicago's Sears Tower,” which has the entire conservative blogosphere furiously typing with one hand as they have a celebratory wank, because, while of course it’s great anytime would-be criminals of any stripe are thwarted, I just can’t get my knickers in an exultant twist for the reason so eloquently stated by Josh Marshall:

I'm sure the FBI special agents working this case must have realized this was the stupidest group of would be terrorists they're likely to come upon.

From the DOJ release ...

In addition to conducting surveillance, the defendants allegedly provided the individual, whom they believed was an al Qaeda member, with a list of materials and equipment needed to wage jihad, including boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios and vehicles.

Boots and uniforms? Terrorist uniforms?

It occurs to me that the government and its rabid, mindless supporters have done more with their trumpeting triumphalism to categorize these rubes as dangerous terrorists than they appear capable of ever having actually been.

Mind you, I’m extremely glad that they never managed to accomplish anything, but when it appears that they probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway, yet we nonetheless insist on elevating their status, that’s indicative of a true sickness in our culture—a sickness that starts with casting our president as a superhero. Superheroes, of course, need super villains to vanquish, or else they’re no more exciting than a plain old cop (or a plain old president), so now we’re expected to ignore a glaring and woeful lack of baseline competence among wannabe terrorists in order to turn them into iconoclastic foes more befitting a superhero.

Perhaps most distressing about this is that if Bush and his cheerleaders want a dynamic rogue to shore up the president’s hero credentials, there already is one. His name is Osama bin Laden—and he’s still out there. He’s the bloody Joker; these buffoons in Florida are just a bunch of uncredited minions in black ensembles who scuttle about in the background.

We lost the plot when we went into Iraq, lost focus. And now we’re doing it again. We’re transforming henchmen into the stars of the show, while our more important, more dangerous, more organized, more competent nemesis is left safely to his schemes, forgotten.

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UPDATE: Great line from George along the same lines: The Miami group arrested as terrorists, which called itself the "Seas of David," evidently hoping that people might just think they're the latest Royal Caribbean line super ship, were cooking up a plot that was "more aspirational than operational," according to FBI deputy director John Pistole. ...[T]o paraphrase Tom Edison, "Terrorism is 99% aspiration, and 1% perspiration."