For years, people complained during the W. years about preemptive military action, endangered civil rights, the terrorism-inducing inhumanity that is the USA, all of which was counter-intuitively (to them) effective in keeping the bad guys away from the homeland. The same ones are starting to crow that it is inevitable that some bad guy will get through and cause major terrorist damage. And when that happens, by golly we shouldn’t blame anyone — especially current government leaders — since, you see, it was inevitable.

The reasoning looks sound — if you ignore time. Yes, eventually, some guy is likely to successfully exploit one of the many weaknesses of the system. But the failures don’t have to happen on this guy’s watch. One can fight them by reacting to what they’ve tried, predicting what they’ll try next … smart and willing people can put up a fight.

But what does Mr. Security suggest? To roll over: all those new security measures and evolving counter-tactics are all a stupid game we should stop playing. Maybe they bad guys will just leave the “playground” and go home to shag some goats. Right. Or else they will succeed in an attack against weakened defenses, in which case it sure wouldn’t be our chief-executive pal’s fault, since it was inevitable.

Brilliant.