Boston police terrorize city

You would think a city that has Ted Kennedy and John Kerry for its senators would have a little more tolerance for cartoons.

On Wednesday the Boston police terrorized the local population after an electric advertising sign was misidentified as a suspicious package.

It does not appear that anyone involved with Cartoon Network's advertising campaign made a hoax threat or called police to report a suspicious package. At this point, it looks like the police spotted the sign and went into Heightened Alert Autopilot.

Police established quickly that the device was not an explosive and not dangerous in any way.

Then more of the signs were spotted around town.

That's the official moment, if you're marking down these times for the record books, when the terrorists won.

The fact that the first device was a harmless advertising sign could have led police to judge that identical devices around the city were equally harmless.

But nobody wanted to take responsibility for that decision.

Instead, the police went down the list of terrorist scenarios conjured up in the fevered imaginations of people who want to listen to your phone calls and follow you around on the Internet.

Maybe the first wave of devices was harmless in order to pull resources in one direction, while the second wave of devices contained the real bombs.

Maybe the terrorists were watching from the shadows and timing the response of the bomb squad for a future attack.

Maybe Homeland Security Department officials missed something in the terrorist chatter that takes place in a language none of them speak.

Maybe everybody should just calm down.

This would be a different story if the advertising signs were disguised to look like bombs, or were deliberately pointed out as suspicious in order to stir up media coverage. But that does not appear to be the case. Boston police and city officials made a mistake, and rather than admit that they panicked the city over nothing, they are self-righteously blaming Turner Broadcasting and its employees for terrorizing Boston, when the company is really guilty of nothing more than posting billboards without a permit.

[Adult Swim] forever.


Copyright 2007

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