And out come the stupids

In the 48 hours since Cory Lidle's plane flew into a building on the Upper East Side, there have been all sorts of silly, dimwitted and downright panicked reactions by people who were nowhere near the impact.

Most center around the fact that, five years after Sept. 11, a giant armored dome wasn't built over Manhattan to protect it from hurtling aircraft.

In the hours immediately after, I recall watching CNN and seeing Jack Cafferty grumble his way through some viewer e-mail. One, from Brooklyn appeared to advocate a total ban on planes anywhere in the country taking off without a flight plan and total supervision from our nation's already chronically understaffed corps of air-traffic controllers.

There has also been grandstanding from pols. "A smart terrorist could load up a small, little plane with biological, chemical or even nuclear material and fly up the Hudson or East rivers, no questions asked," said Senator Charles Schumer, who clearly favors floating security desks at all approaches to Manhattan, at pilots would have questions asked.

Our douchebag governor got into the act, too. Yeah, those controllers keeping jumbos from piling up over Canarsie and East Rutherford, let's make them monitor the 1010 WINS traffic chopper, too. Because effective air-traffic control would totally have made that plane's turn tigther.

While this disaster wasn't an act of terrorism, I think it's safe to say, all these people _ and presumably thousands of others _ have been pretty effectively terrorized. And they've shown as much by their reactions.