Fear Chutzpah

It is getting so that it is never too early in the week to consider Chutzpah of the Week candidates. As we may recall, last week the FBI issued a warning that the next Al Qaeda target in the United States would be a shopping mall during the holiday shopping season; but by the end of the week, as Stacy St. Clair reported for the Daily Herald, "Local and federal authorities" were downplaying this warning. This general call for cooler heads, however, seems to have been ignored by Tom Tancredo, who seems to have decided that, if he cannot raise his poll numbers by any other means, he should pull out the brute-force weapon of fear. Eric Kleefeld has posted the resulting video advertisement, complete with Tancredo's statement of approval "because someone needs to say it," which posits that, if "spineless politicians" continue to ignore the immigration problem, then terrorists will soon be blowing up our shopping malls. One wonders if Tancredo did not also pay for the "Hillary for 2008?" advertisement on Kleefeld's Talking Points Memo Web page, since the photograph of her is not particularly complimentary. My only fear in giving Tancredo an award for this kind of chutzpah is that it will open the field to even more outrageous advertising based on the principle that nothing gathers attention like raw fear!