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Airheads. Every fifteen minutes another unbelievably loud and close fighter jet zooms over my desk.

That's because it's time for the Chicago Air & Water Show, an expensive and idiotic display of something whose purpose I fail to understand.

Of course I do understand that these types of shows are actually displays of air power, but that makes them even more sickening under the circumstances. What kind of role did air defense play in 9/11? A failing role. Did the "Shock and Awe" of American air power do much of either, three years after the fact? The Iraqi insurgency seems neither shocked nor awed. When does the bragging stop and the achieving begin?

Speaking of shockingly awful, since 9/11 it is difficult to witness these jets flying in such close proximity to North America's tallest buildings — all in the name of "entertainment." Tons of steel flying at hundreds of miles per hour next to the nation's highest skyscrapers. What could go wrong?

And the cost... Body armor, nope. Veterans, nope. Airport security, nope. Given this administration's reckless tendency to fund a bizarro universe instead of the one in which we live, how do we know the budget for altimeters and gyroscopes wasn't slashed, sending these jets headlong into a bunch of highrise condominium buildings? It's no longer inconceivable that routine aviation threatens cities.

So much risk for so little return. Wherever he has been for the last five long years, Osama is grinning.

{ 3:38 PM }

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