Senator Mark Dayton moved his official office from Washington D.C. to Minnesota for a few weeks, after a secret security briefing alarmed him. An unsigned editorial in the Strib today says, "It is simply impossible to take Dayton's alarm seriously in the absence of any other lawmaker or security official, so far, coming to a similar conclusion." This is very badly thought. First of all, a security official did come to a similar conclusion: the official who decided that the senators needed to be briefed on new threats. Why do you brief senators about risk, unless you think it reasonable that they change their behavior? And, for major terrorist risk, the only change that makes sense is: to leave the place terrorists are most likely to attack. Also, we don't know what other senators have done about the warnings; we just know that they didn't close their D.C. offices. And finally, it happens all the time that one person's judgment is better than everybody else's. Is that impossible for Mark Dayton, just because he's a senator, a Dayton, a Minnesotan?
We know this: Mark Dayton took a serious political risk to protect his staff and his constituents, when he could have gained the same security for himself by developing a bad cold and going home for chicken soup.
The Strib today reports that Dayton's decision "spurs bafflement." If the newspaper has nothing more to say about an actual individual decision than that it was baffling, perhaps the editors need to read some books. They could start with Walden.
Posted by shea0017 at October 14, 2004 9:36 AM