Fear itself by @BloggersRUs

Fear itself

by Tom Sullivan

Restraining myself from posting one of Stephen Colbert's "ThreatDown" bits (maybe the All-Bear Edition). The numbers are in:

Washington (CNN)Americans have grown increasingly wary of ISIS over the past six months, but their confidence in the U.S.' ability to combat the extremist group is waning, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.

The poll finds fully 80% of Americans say ISIS poses a serious threat to the United States — a steady increase from September, when 63% said the same.

Only 6 percent think ISIS is not a serious threat. The latest suicide attacks in Yemen and the museum attack in Tunisia will probably shave that number down some more. But how real are those perceptions? (Stupid question.) Paul Waldman examines that at Plum Line:

It isn’t hard to figure out why so many people think the Islamic State threatens the United States. When you see horrifying descriptions and pictures of beheadings, your emotional response can overwhelm any kind of rational reaction. To many people, there’s a large undifferentiated mass of scary foreigners out there, and any news related to terrorism or war anywhere means that we’re more endangered than we were. And then, of course, we have politicians who go around telling any camera they can that we’re all about to die; give props to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for telling a three-year-old girl, “Your world is on fire.”

But guess what: Our world isn’t on fire. Yet it’s almost impossible to say in our contemporary debates that a hostile country or terrorist group isn’t a threat, especially if you’re a politician. Claim that the Islamic State — horrible though it may be — isn’t much of a threat to us, and you’ll be branded naïve at best, a terrorist sympathizer at worst.

Now, let’s entertain a truly radical notion: Even if the Islamic State could launch a successful terrorist attack in the United States, that still wouldn’t make them much of a threat. How many Americans could they kill? A dozen? A hundred? That would be horrible. But car accidents kill almost a hundred Americans each and every day.

I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers' list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We're not very good at this.

Waldman writes, "The same people who want everyone to constantly proclaim the United States’ awesomeness often act as though we’re a nation on the verge of destruction, so weak and vulnerable are we in the face of knife-wielding masked men thousands of miles away."

Closer to home — you may not have known this — homosexual marriage is a "tip of the spear" threat requiring drastic measures. Via a recording from Israel presented to an American Pastors Network conference this week, Mike Huckabee asked pastors to "call down God’s fire" on America, reports Right Wing Watch. But wait. There's more:

Among the participants was Sandy Rios, the American Family Association's director of governmental affairs and daily radio host, who repeated her warning to those in attendance that they had better "prepare for martyrdom" if marriage equality becomes legal throughout the country.

Update: Just recalled that someone on the radio recently quipped that the chances of being killed by a terrorist are less than the chances of being struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark.