Terrorism Futures

Colby Cosh (via Instapundit), describing the reaction of certain Senators and newspaper writers when faced with the (gasp!) horride and gruesome idea of DARPA’s futures market:

Here’s Florida Today checking in from the Space Coast: “The Pentagon’s plan to open a Web site for people to bet on terrorist assassinations and other geopolitical disasters was tasteless, ludicrous and embarrassing to the United States.” If someone wants to blow up the Vehicle Assembly Building, it appears Florida Today would rather not know! Talk about a commitment to good taste.

Newsday’s Ellis Henican writes “This was an idea so patently gruesome and spectacularly stupid, when I first heard it I thought it had to be a hoax.” I felt the same way when I heard there were newspaper columnists who heard new ideas and were incapable of forming any impression of them beyond their instinctual reaction. Hey, if I want to see a dumb animal recoil from a stimulus, I won’t buy a newspaper–I’ll throw firecrackers at my cat!

Exactly. Instapundit has a bunch of great links on the issue, and Yglesias joins me in flinging feces at the posturing Senators who killed this before they had any idea what it was.

The most annoying thing for me is not the way the Democrats behaved- and here are two more over the top reactions:

Criticism mounted yesterday. On the Senate floor, Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle of South Dakota denounced the program as “an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. This is just wrong.”

At an Armed Services Committee hearing, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called it “a futures market in death.”

What pisses me off is how the Republicans caved on this. That is just unacceptable. I expect the Democrats to be against EVERYTHING this administration does- that is all they have done for three years. I don’t expect the sort of weak in the knee response to innovation that I got from the elephants yesterday. That was disgusting.