Ban "MacGyver" reruns

To the British police specialists who apparently thwarted a coordinated terrorist plot to blow up as many as ten different airliners in midair, we all owe a huge thanks. That goes for the Pakistani police cooperation that played a key role, as well as our own anti-terror forces.

No need for me to recount the details which have dominated the news in the last day. However, to me, one of the most interesting aspects of this story is/will be looking at who the plotters are. So far the stories indicate that these people were young British citizens whose parents came from Pakistan. They are more or less middle class and they were willing to die in order to carry out their plan.

If all that is true, some of the quotes from the usual Republican windbags don’t make much sense to me. Many seem only designed to pump up approval ratings for a failed war policy. How on earth they can say the war in Iraq is helping to reduce the threat to air travel posed by young religious zealots in Europe remains a mystery to me.

How can they say with a straight face that fighting “them” over there is keeping “us” safer here?

If anything, it would seem the American presence in the Middle East, such as it is, would aggravate the problem these most recent plotters have with America more than anything else. And, to say they hate us for our love of freedom, as President George Bush repeatedly suggests, is absolutely absurd. They hate America, alright. But mostly they hate what Americans have done/are doing in other countries, not what we are doing here at home.

With the types of bombs these would-be martyrs planned to use, perhaps the best thing the our Homeland Security department could do to prevent such plots from hatching would be to confiscate all known tapes of the once-popular ABC television series, “MacGyver” (1985-92), which starred Richard Dean Anderson, and ban the program from the airwaves.

As I remember the show, with his hands tied behind his back, its hero -- Angus MacGiver -- could make a bomb out of almost anything in the room. In spite of all the hate for Americans, I bet “MacGyver” is still a popular show with a certain stripe of Koran-thumping zealot prone to mayhem.