Progressives: Amateur UK Hi-jinks are Hilarious Pranks!

 
Ah, the progressive left: it never fails to disappoint when it comes to pretending we're not at war. After the aborted terrorist car-bomb attacks in London, Keith Olbermann and analyst Larry Johnson yucked it up at the expense of thousands of terrified Piccadilly Circus visitors.

Johnson's claim: that the car bombs would have done no real damage; each car would have burned and perhaps singed a few duffers standing within 20 or 30 feet. British officials, however, indicate that the blast radius would have been "several hundred yards."

In fact, MSNBC -- Olbermann's very employer -- stated that each car bomb contained "six to eight tanks of propane [that could result in] a fuel-air explosion, creating a fireball the size of a small house and propelling 18 to 20 boxes of roofing nails around a large area at bullet speed."

The next day's Glasgow airport attack didn't help the regressive cause. Johnson, though, was quick to respond on his blog with word that the Glasgow attack was a hilarious prank gone awry.

Preliminary, unconfirmed reports indicate a nuclear blast has occurred at Glasgow's international airport. No one has seen the mushroom cloud or heard the blast, but something by God is happening and it must be terrible. There is smoke and fire. In fact, a car is on fire. It must be Al Qaeda. Only Al Qaeda knows how to set themselves on fire inside a car. Please. Flee to the hills (leave you doors unlocked). Oh the humanity!

Johnson isn't the sharpest tool in the shed; one simple concept seems to have escaped him: If the amateurs are organized well enough to carry out near-miss attacks without being detected by the authorities, what do the professionals have up their sleeves?

And Ace reminds us of Larry Johnson's dismal track record:

It's simply shocking that a man who wrote an NYT op-ed called "The Declining Threat of Terrorism" which denigrated the terrorist threat and wrote that "Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism" on July 10, 2001 not only is so shameless to continue peddling the same "Don't Worry, Be Happy" advice he disasterously gave to the government... but has a legion of liberal hacks eager to entertain his catastrophically wrong mindset... If [I'd] made that pronouncement about the silliness of worrying about terrorism a scant three months before 9/11, I'd be "living quietly" about such issues, out of simple respect for the dead...

Meanwhile, over at "progressive" portal DailyKos, the UK terror attempts have escaped notice.

There are no front-page articles about either the propane-gasoline-nail-laden car-bombs, nor the burning Jeep that barreled into the lobby of the Glasgow airport. However, a Kos diarist does theorize that the incidents are completely unrelated and that "British officials are freaking out" for no reason.

Commenters add to the hilarity with conspiracy theories and other "progressive realism":

Those incidents in London and Glasgow are SO similiar that they seem to have absoultely nothing to do with each other. Damn those terrorists are getting cagy! Both incidents can be mischaracterized by the government and fear-monger media to terrorize the public, distract from BAE and other really scary scandals, and generally amass power at the expense of civil rights and public freedom. Is it possible the[r]e is absolutely nothing here but scaremongering?

Perhaps the next conspiracy theory emanating from the regressives is that the British CCTV cameras snapped pictures of Karl Rove and Ehud Olmert running away from the scene of the attacks.

Today's progressives are sufficiently divorced from reality that their statements seem indistinguishable from satire.