Richard Cohen on the Seas of David plot: "theirs was such a preposterous, crackpot plot that the only reason it rose to the level of a televised news conference by the nation's chief law enforcement officer was the Bush administration's compulsive need to hype everything. For this, Gonzales, like a good Boy Scout, is always prepared."

All true. Cohen says this habit is one of the reasons the administration has so little credibility on anything it says. True enough. It's also worth noting, however, that this stuff is problematic in a more direct way. Obviously, one of the things terrorism is supposed to do is, well, terrorize people. The actual risk of dying in a terrorist attack is very, very, very low but terrorism is scary in a way that, say, the risk of getting of dying in a random car accident isn't. One of the things the government needs to be doing is trying to keep people reasonably calm about the general security of the United States (while, of course, focusing on preventing truly catastrophic attacks). Instead, Bush's impulse is always to do the reverse -- blow things out of proportion and scare people.