After the 1992 election, it took over a year for the first signs of significant right-wing populist activity to appear in America – signs like the quasi-military “militia” movement in Michigan and elsewhere, the appearance of bunkered apocalyptic religious communities – Waco, etc, and the carefully nurtured paranoid rumors of “Black Helicopters”, UN invasion forces and the “cocaine/mafia hit men” working for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This time very genuinely disturbing trends are starting to appear even before Obama takes office.
The reason, of course, is obvious. The insidious smears directed at Obama by McCain’s media operation, the right-wing media and third-party internet rumors directly identified him with violent political terrorism, Moslem extremism and thuggery and intimidation by Black militants. Nothing remotely this inflammatory was leveled at Clinton during the 1992 campaign.
Republicans will now try to dismiss this as just the natural excesses of a “hard-fought campaign” and more politically sophisticated Republicans will now ratchet down the rhetoric and concede that none of the charges were literally or even remotely true.
But this uniquely vile propaganda offensive has left a huge toxic residue. There are now millions of Americans who quite sincerely believe that all the accusations noted above about Obama are in large part or in complete measure true. They are particularly concentrated in working class and small town America, where informal “word of mouth” channels of communication are trusted more than national media. The core group that accepts this view are long time hard-right conservatives but their influence extends outward in concentric circles of person-to-person communication.
Many Obama supporters do not directly sense the extraordinary degree of cultural disenfranchisement and political isolation these people are feeling at this moment because they do not ordinarily socialize with this sector of America. But the sense of genuine shock and – yes – fear is very, very real.
Read the following digest of a call-in to G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, reported by Media Matters:

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama [talking about the America Corps program] saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,”

This kind of paranoid discourse could previously be assumed to be confined to a relatively small fringe of the conservative right. But, as the crowds at Sarah Palin’s speeches indicated, it has recently metastasised well beyond its traditional boundaries. This new and larger group is composed of basically decent people, but they are genuinely afraid.
As a result, Democrats must seriously anticipate that the increasingly extreme right-wing attitudes and social movements that developed over a three-four year period during Clinton’s first term may start to appear within a matter of a few months rather than years.
What can Dems do? First, while not compromising on needed programs and policies, they must maintain a sincere stance and attitude of inclusiveness – as Obama himself is doing. The basic fact is that these Americans are not our enemies. They are, in Obama’s excellent formulation, potential supporters we have yet to convince.
Second, Democrats at all levels should aggressively insist that the more sophisticated Republican advocates in the media and elsewhere who helped promulgate the vilest of the smears should not be “forgiven” for what they did until they make real and substantial efforts to remediate the toxic legacy of this campaign.
They poisoned people’s minds. That’s not “hardball” politics; that’s just disgusting. They have an obligation to help repair the damage they did to the United States of America.

It’s time to cut the usual election-year BS and speak the truth.
To start with, let’s admit one thing off the bat. Even if (as almost all non-partisan observers say) few if any of the phony, “Mickey Mouse-Donald Duck” type registrations that the Acorn organization collects actually show up as fraudulent voters trying to cast illegal ballots, there is still something that feels shoddy and basically distasteful about paying temporary canvassers based on a quota for registering voters. It cheapens the dignity of the democratic process and provides an incentive for padding lists with fake registrations that have to be cleaned out or worried about later on.
In fact, if the McCain campaign and the US Department of Justice had raised complaints about this particular method of registration last winter or spring, a lot of deeply partisan democrats might not have gone out of their way to help them but would privately have admitted that they had a point.
And the McCain campaign and the DOJ had plenty of time to raise this issue. Acorn has been doing this kind of “pay for results” registration for many years now – and has been investigated by the DOJ before – and it was abundantly clear by last February-March that this year would see a massive increase in new voter registration.
But the sudden dramatic intrusion of the FBI into an election just 19 days before Election Day and just one day after the candidate of the political party currently in control of the FBI and DOJ makes new and inflammatory accusations of voting fraud against his opponent is something far more troubling. It’s a nightmare scenario for anyone who cares about the American system of government.
Let’s say it simply – America is not a one-party state. The people in the federal law enforcement and criminal justice systems are supposed to stay out of politics – not work to support the party in power. There are specific rules and long-standing institutional traditions in the DOJ against publically announcing a major political investigation during the last few days of an election campaign.
This is not just an issue for latte-sipping liberals and ACLU types. You ask average heartland of America guys – the big burly guys with the Vietnam-Vet baseball hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” or “Live Free or Die” tea shirts and they will tell you without hesitation:

“Now don’t get me wrong – I love my country – 1,000 percent. But I don’t always trust the federal government to do the right thing. I don’t like it anytime the government starts launching prosecutions that smell like they are politically motivated. This time it might be a guy like Obama who I don’t like worth a damn, but next time it could be Ron Paul or Bob Barr or even me because they don’t like the way I think. When the FBI or Department of Justice starts using the police power of the state to play partisan politics, that’s a dangerous first step toward tyranny and losing all our individual liberty and individual rights.”

If you don’t believe that Middle America is full of guys who think and feel this way, you haven’t been out there lately. You may not like what they say about gun control, but they genuinely care about the constitution and the bill of rights
Up to now McCain has used the “maverick” label to imply he would not continue the Bush Administrations partisan subversion of the DOJ and other federal agencies. But his decision to endorse the FBI investigation and link his campaign to it without a single word of concern about the dangerous violation of political neutrality the last-minute FBI investigation entails catastrophically shatters this presumption. It firmly allies him with the many remaining political appointees in the DOJ who were selected by Monica Goodling – the arrogant right-wing imitation of a classic 1950’s Soviet political commissar who purged all political opponents, demanded that DOJ employees prosecute political enemies or be dismissed and forced applicants for non-partisan jobs to answer illegal propaganda questions like “What is it about George Bush that makes you want to serve him?”
Republicans will argue that the DOJ is just doing its job or that their actions are just a normal part of “hardball” politics. Dems, however, can fairly reply “Well maybe in a third world banana republic or a 1950’s Soviet-controlled country they are, but this is America. We do it different here.”
McCain likes to argue that “I’m not George Bush”. But Dems can fairly reply “No, but the DOJ will obviously be run in exactly the same, repulsive way that it was during the Bush administration.”
In fact, it’s actually ironic. The last-minute intrusion of the FBI into the 2008 campaign actually gave John McCain the ideal opportunity to show that he really would be a different kind of Republican from George W. Bush. Instead, he used the opportunity to show that he will be exactly the same.

Conservatives are going to start claiming that the 2008 election will be “stolen by goons and hooligans,” that “Dems caused the financial crisis” and that Obama is a ”secret radical/terrorist sympathizer” — and they are going to throw John McCain right under a bus if he doesn’t play along.
Dedicated movement conservatives can read the poll numbers as well as anyone else and, in the last few days, they have started to see that John McCain may very well lose this election.
They can live with that. They have been in opposition before – like the Clinton years – and they can figure out a political strategy to follow once they are in opposition. But they are also aware that an Obama victory poses a threat of unprecedented dimensions to their brand of conservatism. It is the kind they like to call “existential” – a threat to their very existence.
Coming after an intensely fought election campaign with a compelling — indeed mediagenic, rock- star cultural conservative like Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, a strong Obama victory would imply:

That most Americans don’t actually share cultural conservative’s vision of themselves as “the real America,” opposed by only a minority of educated elites.
That most Americans don’t share the view that Obama and Democrats are essentially un-American and unpatriotic.
That most Americans do, in fact, believe that it was eight years of Republican pro-free market policies that created the current economic crisis.

This, conservatives simply cannot accept. As a result, in the last few days, we have seen the beginnings of the new conservative narrative start to emerge from Steve Schmidt’s Rovian media operation within the McCain campaign. The key elements of this new narrative are as follows:

1. That Barack Obama is not only actually a secret radical/terrorist sympathizer but that there has been a vast and concerted conspiracy by “the mainstream media filter” to hide this truth from voters.
2. That leading Dems including Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reed are the primary culprits in the current financial crisis
3. That primarily Black “goons and hooligans” are going to steal the election.

Each of these new tropes has been launched by one or more of the major McCain campaign ads in the last few days and each is widely repeated and reinforced by extensive viral e-mail campaigns.
As a result, each of these notions is already being reflected directly back to McCain in the remarks his supporters are making to him at his town meetings – remarks like the woman who insisted that Obama is actually “an Arab” or “a terrorist” or the men who argued that McCain should get “the names of the people responsible for the crisis and punish them” and that “goons and hooligans” are going to steal the election.
When McCain finally felt obligated to speak up and disagree with these distortions last Friday he was roundly booed by his own supporters – and it will only get worse after the election. If McCain does not rigidly stick to the new conservative script that Steve Schmidt has handed him to read and he loses the election, the conservatives – including Sarah – “et tu, Brutus” – Palin – will turn on him like wild hyenas.
If you think Democrats have been mean to McCain this year, just wait until you hear the conservatives rip him apart after the election. They will call him a “weakling,” “a bumbling fool” and a “senile, doddering old man who let an easy victory escape him.” “After all,” they will add knowingly, “he was never really a true conservative to start with.” This “the loss was all McCain’s fault” rationalization will actually provide the fourth and final element of the new conservative narrative.
This may seem cruel, but conservatives really have little choice except to explain the election in this way because a key part of their world view is an unrelenting insistence that politics is a simple morality play of good vs. evil — with themselves invariably in the heroes’ role. In this storyline Conservatives are always basically right and always essentially pure – they do not make fundamental mistakes or display major moral and ethical failings (if an individual conservative does any of these things, it simply proves that he or she was not actually a “real” conservative to begin with).
Thus, the new Steve Schmidt conservative narrative will make it possible for conservatives to continue to claim after the election that the American people don’t really support Barack Obama (they were tricked), that Republican policy did not really cause the current economic crisis (Democrats did) and that true conservatism was not really rejected by the American people (just the overly timid and bumbling John McCain).

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Democrats who were hoping to see Sarah Palin fall flat on her face last Thursday and who were surprised by her performance had failed to note a key line in her resume – that she had worked as a sportscaster on TV.
Had they thought about it a bit they would have realized that the format of the VP debate – quite different from the probing of a one-on-one interview – would powerfully favor any candidate who had been trained in the modern “happy talk” format of local news – a format in which the newscaster, weather reporter and sportscaster are paid to bubble, giggle and chit-chat cheerfully with each other, to mug shamelessly into the camera and to generally project a “gosh we’re just having the best good old time of our lives delivering the local news” kind of attitude. Winks are not mandatory, but – along with cutsy-poo nose crinkles and manic eyebrow raising – they are not all that uncommon either.
If you found yourself wondering “where did Palin learn to do those moves?”, go out and rent “Up Close and Personal” – a 1990’s movie depicting TV veteran Robert Redford teaching rookie weathergirl Michelle Pfeiffer how to project warmth, confidence and animation on the small screen. You will have a painful but salutary “aha” moment when you see the some of the backstage mechanics behind the apparently effortless projection of onscreen energy, vitality and spunky charm.
Here’s one simple example – injecting animation and excitement into the voice. Listen to some of the debate again (if you can stand it) and note the way Palin’s voice rises and falls within every sentence and how she always puts emphasis on at least one word. It’s almost as if every fifth or sixth word is underlined. The effect is to convey both conviction and excitement.
To see how important this is, say the sentence “I really like peas” out loud, first putting strong emphasis on the word “really” and then on the word “like.” Although the underlying words are exactly the same, when spoken aloud the first sentence conveys something like “I’m not kidding here, I genuinely love those darn things” while the second sentence conveys something more like “I know lots of people are indifferent about peas but I personally think they are great” It is these subtle differences in tone and emphasis that create the impression of energy and freshness in spoken communication.
Palin is certainly not the first Republican politician to have been underestimated by Democrats because they do not understand the mechanics of TV. In the 1980 campaign and during his first year in office, Ronald Reagan was widely ridiculed and dismissed by Democrats because he carried around 3 x 5 cards with little sound-bites for the cameras (“Sound-bites” weren’t even called that until Reagan established them and got them recognized as a distinct political art form) and for his penchant for using personal anecdotes and stories rather than facts and data.
Many Democrats saw these things as evidence of his lack of experience and sophistication while Reagan – who had years of experience as a TV announcer and commercial pitchman in the 50’s – ripped through them like a buzz saw out of hell because he knew more about how to effectively engage TV viewers and form a bond with them then all his critics put together.
Reagan also perfected the entirely fictional TV character – “the ordinary, common-sense American goes to Washington to shake things up” that Sarah Palin is now channeling. Before Reagan, politicians always played this role as a demagogue – performed by bitter and nasty men like George Wallace, Richard Nixon Spiro Agnew and Pat Buchannan – men seething with resentment and anger. It was Reagan who created a different image of the conservative outsider – as an optimistic, cheerful and sunny visitor from the wholesome world of the “real” America. This is the role which first George Bush and now Sarah Palin have reprised for a new TV audience (Palin, in fact, was rather blatantly trying to use almost the entire big bag of vintage Reagan chops in last week’s VP debate – right down to his signature phrase “there you go again”. An excellent final essay for Media Studies classes this year would be “name all the classic Ronald Reagan tropes that Sarah Palin used in her VP debate” – anything less than eight items should be a D)
Let’s face it. It’s time Democrats stopped being blindsided by this stuff. There is almost nothing in Sarah Palin’s bag of tricks that Reagan didn’t use to great effect on Carter, Mondale and others 30 years ago (except perhaps for an occasional whiff of Reese Witherspoon in full speed plucky-spunky “if I am elected Miss Alaska” final speech uplift mode). We have to get serious about studying and understanding the media rather than wishing politics was still conducted like the Lincoln-Douglass debates.
Like the old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
You betcha, goshdarnit.

In the very brief recent period between John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and his erratic behavior during the last few days, very serious and fundamental questions about McCain’s character, behavior and temperament have become widespread.
But observers have found difficulty in fitting McCain’s various behaviors into any single recognizable pattern. Each critique focuses on a different and apparently unrelated issue – his instability, recklessness, tolerance for mendacity and self-righteousness among others.
There is, however, one very interesting psychological framework that actually does seem to fit the broad pattern of behavior we are now seeing.
Consider the following personality profile:

1. The person is impulsive and does not think about consequences – he or she seems to embrace the philosophy – “just do it”
2, the person is a risk-taker and thrill-seeker. His or her conduct often seems reckless and blind to possible damage or harm. There is a lack of normal prudence and caution.
3. The person exhibits an attitude of “the rules don’t apply to me.” The person clearly understands the difference between right and wrong and even becomes outraged and furious when other people violate the rules. But the person simply cannot apply these rules to his or her own conduct. These individuals’ own violations are always “no big deal” or somehow justified by circumstances.
4. The person exhibits a significant degree of self-centeredness and narcissism – He or she seems to operate according to a philosophy of “it’s all about me”. These individuals have an inability to see events in a larger context than how they affect the person him or herself.

Gee. Seems pretty on the mark, doesn’t it.
Yet, in fact, the description above is actually a profile that is familiar to many people in the juvenile justice system – it is a description of the behavioral syndrome seen in many adolescents – often from stable, good families — who become enmeshed in the criminal justice system because of repeated delinquent behavior like speeding, drunk driving, promiscuity, low-level drug dealing or burglary (not for survival but “just for kicks”) and a whole panoply of other juvenile misbehavior.
Traditional psychological approaches were not very successful in developing a coherent theory to explain this behavioral syndrome. Until the mid-1980’s, in fact, the attempts to understand these different personality characteristics were usually presented in separate chapters of standard textbooks.
The revolutionary advances in cognitive neuroscience in the last 20 years, however – and particularly in CT and fMRI based brain imaging – have provided a dramatically new perspective. It has been found that, although these different personality characteristics are localized in a variety of locations within the brain, they all appear to be mediated (“densely interconnected,” in neurophysical terms) through the prefrontal cortex.
This fact, together with the discovery that the prefrontal cortex often does not completely develop until the early 20’s, has led to a tremendous rethinking of youthful delinquency. An emerging body of legal theory, in fact, considers that neural imaging of the prefrontal cortex may even provide a legal basis for a defense of diminished capacity in young adults.
But what does this possibly have to do with a 72 year old man with a long career in political life? John McCain is clearly not going to hotwire a Mustang and drive off on the beltway at 90 miles an hour.
The answer is that some individuals consistently tend toward the expression of these personality characteristics throughout their entire lifetimes. In McCain’s case simple observation also suggests two additional conclusions:

1. That the above noted, seemingly unrelated personality characteristics which McCain is exhibiting are actually part of a single, coherent behavioral syndrome.
2. That, for whatever reason, the expression of these characteristics in John McCain’s behavior has dramatically increased in recent months.

A number of years ago I observed as a leading expert in delinquent behavior delivered the news to the distraught parents of a young man that there was no easy answer or quick fix for their son’s behavior. The expert concluded:

“You just have to wait and trust that time will help to reduce his problematic conduct. In the meantime, just use common sense – don’t go out of town and leave him alone in the house, and –whatever you do – don’t give him the keys to the car.”

Gee, that sure sounds like good advice to me, doesn’t it.

I happen to be a boxing fan and have watched TV with great appreciation for many years as a succession of pudgy guys with Brooklyn accents fired off incredibly rapid-fire barstool-type commentary about “working the body”, “landing more punches”, “getting ahead on points but not scoring the knockout”, “dominating the ring” and so on.
This very distinctive and utterly American mode of sports analysis has evolved gradually over the years in close connection to the evolving rules by which professional boxing matches are conducted and scored. It is intimately tied to the unique way in which strategy, cunning, speed, power, physical endurance and willpower are combined in professional boxing. One can see the unique aspects of professional boxing as a sport and martial art simply by comparing it other martial arts like Muay Tai or MMA that have significantly different techniques and rules.
But what in blazes does any of this have to do with judging a presidential debate? The objective is entirely different – it is to convince viewers that a candidate will do a better job of running the county than his opponent, not that he is superior in a contest of verbal bullying and aggression that metaphorically mirrors physical combat.
Case in point – the notion that Obama’s willingness to say “I agree with you, John” on a number of points represented weakness on his part while McCain’s repeated use of the phrase “what Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand” should be tallied up as points for his side in exactly the same way as points are scored on a scorecard in a Las Vegas middleweight championship.
Usually, there is not enough data to show that this boxing match metaphor misconstrues what ordinary viewers are looking for when they watch a debate. Last night, however, a number of polls and focus groups all converged in their reactions to the debate (see the post below) and clearly indicated that they saw Obama’s refusal to do a “Rush Limbaugh/barroom loudmouth” imitation as positive thing and not negative one.
After all, don’t we really want our candidate to have the self-confidence and the character to calmly agree with the opposition when they happen to be right on an issue rather than insisting that every single word out of an opponent’s mouth must necessarily be boneheaded idiocy? Don’t most middle of the road voters want that too?
So enough with the bad Howard Cosell-Lennix Lewis imitations already. A debate is not a boxing match. It should not be scored as one.
A matter a fact, I gotta tell you Howard, if these commentators guys keep this up, they’re gonna run outta gas in the championship rounds. They’re behind on points and you can see their punches just don’t have any real power behind them any more. The body work they took in the early rounds has done its job and they are starting let their guard fall. They got a big swelling over the left eye that’s probably gonna open up soon and could stop the fight. They are going to have to go for a knockout early in the tenth or the judges are going to take it away from them.

The co-editors of The Democratic Strategist are all very strongly associated with the view that, to create an enduring Democratic majority, Dems have to win the support of a substantial minority of working class voters.
In a Brookings Institution study early this spring TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira provided an up to date analysis of the underlying population demographics that support this view and last month TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg led a team from Democracy Corps that conducted a sophisticated survey and focus group analysis of Macomb county, Michigan seeking to understand the attitudes of working class voters in this election and to find the best ways to win their support.
The objective of winning working class support was clearly evident in the Democratic convention. As Ron Brownstein noted yesterday:

Democrats sought to segment the voters by class. They presented Obama (the “son of a single mom”) and running mate Joe Biden (the “scrappy kid from Scranton”) as working-class heroes who would defend the middle-class because they are products of it. The Democrats portrayed McCain as an out-of-touch economic elitist who doesn’t understand the interests of average families.

The Republicans, in contrast “sought to segment the voters along cultural lines”

They presented McCain as the personification of timeless values–honor and duty. Far more importantly (and effectively), they introduced vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as an embodiment of small-town America who champions conservative social values not only in public life but also in her private life. They completed the picture with tough national security messages that usually resonate loudest with the same traditionalist voters most attracted to conservative social positions. Meanwhile, the Republicans portrayed Obama as an out-of-touch cultural elitist who belittles small towns like Palin’s Wasilla as not “cosmopolitan enough.”

On the surface, national economic conditions would seem to favor the Democrats. But, as Brownstein notes, “The first post-convention polls suggested that the Republicans succeeded more than the Democrats in dividing the electorate along the lines they prefer.”

An array of surveys released this week show McCain dominating among economically pressed but culturally conservative (and generally hawkish) white working-class voters, just as President Bush did in 2004.
In the Diageo/Hotline daily tracking survey this week, Obama was winning just 30 percent of white men without a college education, even lower than the meager 35 percent share that exit polls recorded for John Kerry in 2004. Among white no college women, Obama was attracting just 37 percent, down from Kerry’s 40 percent. Among “waitress moms” (married white women without college degrees), Obama was polling just 33 percent in the Diageo/Hotline survey, no improvement on Kerry’s anemic 32 percent.

To be sure, this is very disappointing (and there is reason to think that these numbers may improve somewhat between now and Election Day). But there are, in fact, entirely reasonable explanations for why the Democratic convention did not produce the movement toward Obama that was hoped for – explanations which suggest how Dems can do substantially better in the future.
(In fact, after the election, The Democratic Strategist will launch a major initiative to bring together Democrats from every sector of the party to develop an organized and coherent three-year strategy for peeling off a significant number of the more “middle of the road” members of the Republican working class coalition in time for the 2012 election.)
But right now, Obama and the Democrats face a difficult strategic choice. As Brownstein notes:

…some analysts wonder whether Obama might be better served by shifting his focus toward upscale voters more likely to recoil from a Republican ticket that wants to ban abortion and has praised the teaching of creationism.
Obama recently dipped his toe in that water with a radio ad presenting McCain as a threat to legalized abortion. This week, Biden also lashed the GOP platform’s opposition to stem-cell research. But [the campaign needs] a more concerted effort from Obama to convince socially liberal constituencies (such as single women or infrequent churchgoers) that McCain and Palin don’t share their values.

In fact, there is actually an even an broader group who may be an even more important target in the next six weeks — not just the members of specific, relatively liberal constituencies but the much wider swath of reasonably thoughtful, middle of the road voters who have not voted Democratic in recent years but who deeply desire a higher, more intelligent level and quality of political leadership than the myopically partisan and ideologically driven Bush administration has provided.
McCain has utterly abandoned these voters in this campaign – both with his cynically dishonest advertising that literally insults their intelligence and with his choice of a running mate whose function is to play the role of a Rush Limbaugh attack dog on the campaign trail rather than demonstrate any capacity to be a potential leader of the Republic.
In the long run there is no question that Democrats must develop a strategy for winning a substantial group of working class voters if they wish to create an enduring Democratic majority. But, in the next six weeks, it may be that the heaviest emphasis should be put on winning the growing number of thoughtful middle of the road voters who were initially attracted to John McCain but who are increasingly appalled by the kind campaign he has chosen to run.

Juan Cole is one of the most respected Middle East specialists and a highly perceptive critic of U.S. policy and strategy in the Moslem world. In his evaluation of the threat of terrorism today, he makes several important observations.
First,

the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core….. That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.
Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. …I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.
Marc Sageman in his ‘Understanding Terror Networks’ estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far…

Cole then reviews the major categories of Moslem terrorist organizations that are currently active and evaluates the dangers they pose to the security and safety of the United States. He says:
Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:

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