Fighting them over here

If nothing else, the one thing the current administration is good at the memorable catch phrase.

But a good catch phrase doesn't make it true.

A case in point is the president's repeated assertion that "we're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them here", or the equally catchy, and its equally misguided cousin, SecDef Gates', "It's important to defend this country on the extremists' 10-yard line, and not on our 10-yard line".

As witnessed by today's news of a home-grown plot to blow up the jet fuel lines to JFK airport, fighting the civil war in Iraq is hardly helping.

In fact I would call Iraq irrelevant to such plots except for this: it serves to further inflame and bolster the wills of those who hate American behavior both around the world and, as we see, here in the US.