Politics of fear making this mall shopper mad

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 16, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.

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I figured it out the other day at a mall in California where my wife and I had repaired to pass the three-hour wait until our late-afternoon flight back to Denver.

Actually, I figured it out in the parking lot while walking from the rental car to the mall's front doors. The government, I remembered from my reading on the flight out, had announced this very place and others like it were the latest targets for terrorists.

I quickly, though, resolved not to bring it up to my wife. She is lovely, but also a worst-case-scenario sort. Trust me, she'd have spent the entire time on the lookout for mall jihadis, ruining the entire outing.

That is when I got mad and, later, quite resolute:

The people who lead us and those who now want the job can go to heck.

I am tired of being scared.

It is why I am still thinking about the ruckus stirred this week by Rep. Tom Tancredo's television ad that is running in Iowa, the spot with the hooded bad guy setting down a backpack in a mall near a group of playing children. The backpack goes boom. In it is a clip of a bloody body and, later, clips of the terrorist attacks in Europe and Russia.

"I'm Tom Tancredo, and I approve this ad because someone needs to say it," is how he opened the spot.

Good heavens.

It should be noted that it is not at all sporting anymore to highlight the foolishness of the Republican congressman from Littleton. In person, I have found him to be an extremely likeable guy, one whose single-minded passion for what he believes in I sort of admire.

It is why you start to feel a little bit sad for him. With this latest ad, this is particularly so.

Perhaps, you want to believe, he has been spending way too much time on stage and in the campaign shadows of terror-obsessed Rudy Guliani, Mitt Romney and other Republican presidential candidates, men who clearly believe their best shot at capturing the Oval Office next year is by scaring the absolute bejeezus out of the rest of us.

It is here where the sadness creeps in. The ad's focus was not even on terrorism. Rather, its message was on the lone issue that Tom Tancredo insists was his sole reason for tossing his hat into the presidential ring: illegal immigration.

The only way the hooded mall bomber made it into America, his ad goes, was through its ridiculously porous borders.

It is the "price we pay," the ad intones as the gory images flash, "for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our border against those who come to kill."

Immigration is a good issue, one that is long overdue for serious debate by those in powerful leadership positions.

Yet finding himself mired in single-digit, Tom-who? polling numbers, the congressman resorts to the tried-and-true fear card. And in the process, he unwittingly - or probably not - nudges and hints that Latin Americans entering this country illegally are out to kill your child and mine.

Which brings us back to the mall terror alert.

The FBI this week said al-Qaida may be targeting U.S. shopping malls, specifically those in Chicago and L.A., during the holiday season.

This, you figure, is handy information. Well, it is until you read further and learn the FBI says it got the information from a source, who got it from someone else, who I'm guessing got it from his second-cousin once-removed - you know, the way wars get started these days.

The bottom line: The FBI says it cannot confirm the authenticity of the information. Well, why say anything in the first place?

I called the Department of Homeland Security. I may have still been in my anger period.

"It is absolutely the right question to ask," DHS spokeswoman Laura Keehner said, pointing out that the mall advisory came from the FBI and not her people. "It is an issue for many Americans."

To distill our conversation, basically she said there are folks out there who want to kill us all, but, in the meantime, please, go about our lives.

Helpful.

She gave me the whole al-Qaida-is- murderous-and-wants-to-strike boilerplate. Lots of intelligence gets dropped on the DHS doorstep, and the mall thing was but a small piece of it.

"If you see something, say something." Laura Keehner says this line is the department's motto, one it emphasizes to the public every day "so that people don't go into a state of apathy.

"It is about keeping an awareness about you."

Indeed. I get this.

It is why I am all over the unattended bag that they keep reminding me about at the airport. It is why if little Jimmy even drops his backpack in the middle of the mall and runs over to play on the plastic toys, I'm dropping a dime on him, too.

Being afraid, I've resolved, is walking with soldiers through the muck and nastiness of a Samarra, Iraq, alley at 2 in the morning. And if I ever do that again, it'll be the next time I am afraid.

Christmas is coming.

I am going to the mall.

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