cares when during your Dem debate there was a question to please raise your hand if you think we are in a Global War on Terrorism and half the people did not raise their hands including Edwards. That is embarrassing.

there is a huge difference
between losing people to the natural accidents / homegrown crime / age / illnesses / etc and losing them in wars or terror acts.

There certainly are psychological differences as you say, but in either case the person is still dead. If losing 40,000 americans to cars every year isn't an existential threat (and it isn't) then losing 3,000 americans once every couple decades certainly isn't.

I am not worried that our country will fall apart, but a huge economic impact could throw us into recession.

Oh, so when you say Al Qaeda is a threat you don't mean as in "Soviet Union with thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us." You mean a threat more like "housing bubble may collapse and cause me to eat ramen for a month."

It occurs to me that they might be less of a threat to our economy if we hadn't just poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq.

Any self respecting country will want to defend itself from an attack that will highlight serious vulnerabilities to our enemies.

Sure, but what you don't get is the actual nature of the attack- the nature of the vulnerability. Al Qaeda goaded us into actions that have caused immense harm to our military, our prestige, and our historic alliances. that's the threat we should fear, not the deaths but our own blundering over reaction.

You want to prevent them from hurting us so bad? Learn the british "stiff upper lip."

Also when the head of the CIA thinks that Al Qaeda is a very serious threat to US, you better believe that I will agree with him well before I agree with your assessment of the threat.

The CIA exists mostly to create threats to our nation, not to defuse them. Their job is making sure America stays in business, and as someone once noted America's business is war. Remember the "Soviet Union with thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us," I mentioned earlier? Turns out that was mostly puff, too. Their capabilities were dramatically over estimated to keep the cold war going. Because that allowed for the sinking of stupid amounts of money into the military-industrial complex.

So really you shouldn't just take the CIA's word about such things. They have a history of making up boogeymen.

currently less than 5% of the shipping containers that enter the US are inspected or checked for radiation.

Bush43 has refused to increase funds needed to do just that. What are we to think by these contradictory statements & actions?

We are to think that the headline and the fear is more valuable to this administration, than actually doing anything about the problem.

Another in the increasingly long list of reasons why some of us don't trust this administration any longer.

If you don't think...
...that a nuclear device exploded in New York City and causing 500,000 deaths and untold casualties would be a threat to the United States, you are beyond naive. Look at the reaction to 9/11-- the political and societal reaction is the whole point!

But as I tried to make clear- that political and societal reaction has nothing to do with Al Qaeda being a threat to us, that is entirely us being a threat to us.

It wouldn't have to be Al Qaeda. Anyone or anything that caused us a bloody nose would get the same hysteria. For reference see Hurricane Katrina.

and to somehow parse that out of the total threat and dismiss it as "us being a threat to ourselves" and pretending that such a panic effect is not inevitable is ridiculous.

The inevitability of it isn't the point. It is the source of the damage that is the point. Al Qaeda cannot cause a panic. We choose to panic or we choose not to.

A panicked nation is certainly a scary thing, and it can cause a lot of damage to itself and others, especially when it has a military budget that makes Ming the Merciless look flaccid. And yet the panic is entirely within our control.

Entirely.

Not admiting that is a cop out. It's denying the personal responsibility each of us has. It's excusing riot as a right.

An attack on NYC like you describe would be a tremendous threat to the existence of the United States as we know it-- it would take great leadership to prevent degeneration into total economic collapse and world war if such an event occurred.

No. Sorry but no. It would take something far more profound to actually derail the huge inertia of this nation. That kind of attack on washington wiping out all three branches of federal government might do it. We've taken far greater hits in the past with no problem.

We suffered as many casualties in WW2 and the civil war when we had a far smaller population to absorb the blow. We've had far worse economic straights such as during the Great Depression. The dow jones industrial average lost close to 90% of it's value before it was over, and yet the country plugged on.

Remember we are talking at best about a small nuclear device. And more likely a tiny one. 500,000 was our upper limit on deaths. Realistically we'd be talking half that or less. Actually realistically it won't happen at allbecause AQ doesn't have the know how.

But even if it did happen our country has in fact gone through worse and survived. Yes there'll be a big hit to the economy. That's not an existential threat.

I think you are mistakenly thinking of this in terms of AQ having a weapon on par with our ICBMs. It's not. Those weapons are in the megaton range. Look at this map:

The damage is pretty localized to an area just a couple miles in diameter. Sure it'll cause havok to a city, even a big city. But the nation? It's a flea bite.

One of the silliest comparisons you've ever made. Death by traffic accident doesn't cause mass panic, threaten economic collapse, cause massive unexpected property damage including damage to vital infrastructure, displace hundreds of thousands from their homes, cause hundreds of thousands of injuries that massively overwhelm hospitals, destroy vital institutions like the stock markets, create conditions for secondary crises like disease and environmental contamination, and so on.

Which only speaks to our strange fixation on small problems over large ones. Far more people will be killed, far more damage done to the country by Honda than by Al Qaeda. And yet we don't panic about the dealership down the street.

Again you can't reclassify the damage done in a panic as somehow part of the Al Qaeda threat. It isn't. It's a separate thing unto itself.

Apparently, Americans feel the convenience of using car transport is worth additional risk

Mostly americans never stop to think about it.

622 people died while riding a bike in 2003... I'm willing to bet that makes riding a bike more dangerous per mile than car travel, so let's quit riding those bikes to work and drive your cars everyone!

What do you want to bet 99.5+% of those deaths were caused by a car hitting the bicyclist? That kind of torpedos your argument.

religious fundamentalists in Turkey are islamists, and religious fundamentalists in US are christians. Which is why I said islamists because that is what they are in Turkey. There can be no comparison between Islamic religious fundamentalists that engage in jihads around the world and ours that think gay marriage and abortion is wrong.

It's your comparison of the two that is so wrong.