Funny, I was going to start and end my post with similar statements. My first statement was a quote "a person is smart but people are stupid" (due to herd behavior). And I was going to end with the fact that many leaders care more about maintaining their seats than losing any lives on their watch and so are ready scare the minority who actually are not afraid of terrorism much more than they are about religions, people and ways of life they ignore (most of the author's examples are in fact evidence of this).

But I edited my post because statistically the majority of us are not afraid. We care, and definitely vote for leaders who refuse to terrorize us a la Cheney, but we know we have to adapt our way of life to minimize the risks--which can be confused with fear, but is actually the rational thing to do, since we're dealing with irrational people.

I was too succinct, but yes the majority needs to do a better job of controlling the message we send to terrorists--that I should have conceded.