Oh, good God

The denizens of Boston — no, make that the citizenry of the entire state of Massachussetts — should be afraid, very afraid. Their city and state are being run by complete incompetents who can easily be thrown into a panic by blinking lights:

Boston temporarily closed parts of bridges, subway stations, an Interstate highway and even part of the Charles River on Wednesday after the authorities found what the police described as suspicious devices at nine places.

But the devices, which included circuit boards, turned out to be part of a marketing campaign by Turner Broadcasting to advertise a cartoon television show, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

…

From the time that the first device was found around 8 a.m., hanging from a steel beam under Interstate 93 at the Sullivan Square subway station, more reports of sightings kept trickling in. They included on the Longfellow and Boston University Bridges, in a room at the Tufts-New England Medical Center, on an overpass in Somerville and at intersections here and in Cambridge.

Explosives experts removed the device at Sullivan Square. Northbound Route I-93 and Storrow Drive were briefly closed. A Coast Guard cutter blocked off a section of the Charles River for several hours. Officials from the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department were called in, as well as bomb squads, and extra police officers were deployed around the city.

This is raw, unbridled stupidity at work. Who needs bombs or jet aircraft, when you can shut down a city and panic its so-called leaders with little blinky lights?

John Brownlee nails it:

This entire thing was very funny and wonderful up until the point that freelance artists hired to do an advertising campaign started being arrested. Then, it just became disgusting. There’s no other way to say this: the City of Boston had a panic attack over something that was just obviously innocuous and meant in good fun. The ‘potential explosives’ the Bomb Squad scrambled around the city to blow up were essentially Lite-Brites. This is a fantastically absurd example of how the highly politicized paranoia of September 11th has come at the cost of any degree of common sense, let alone a sense of fun. Peter Berdovsky is in jail right now because politicans have so terrorized their own constituencies that pictures of cartoon characters are now considered genuine terrorist threats.

The authorities created this panic, not the folks who put these things out. Every single official who contributed to this farce should be fired immediately. Unfortunately, we all know this isn’t going to happen — these morons have made very public jackasses of themselves, and to save face they are going to go on pretending that some imaginary crime was actually committed.