They Hate Us For Our Tiny Windmills

The Bush administration - ever alert, ever vigilant - has compiled a list of the nation's major terrorism targets that includes miniature golf courses:

The Bush administration's effort to create a national database of potential terrorist targets such as dams, pipelines, chemical plants and skyscrapers is far behind schedule and may take years to finish.

Members of Congress who have seen parts of the classified list being created by the Department of Homeland Security say it's a haphazard compilation that includes water parks and miniature golf courses but omits some major sites in need of security.

"Their list is a joke," said Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla., a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. He called it "an exercise in full employment for bureaucrats, rather than a realistic way to make the country safer."

What's especially funny (and this is the sort of in-depth historical analysis you'll find nowhere else but Buffoonia), is that back in the 1930s, communities all over America passed ordinances regulating - or banning outright - the "madness" of miniature-golf, one of the major fears being that courses (especially all-night ones) were sinkholes of sin. As John Margolies describes in his book Miniature Golf,

In 1930 American City magazine wrote: "Miniature golf can indisputably lay claim to having inspired more legislation in a few months than any other form of entertainment on record."

In other words, the only thing that ever seriously threatened this nation's miniature golf courses was the overheated sexual imagination of American morality police.

...Joking aside, is this list a sign of incompetence, or something else? Look at it this way: Why would you put water parks and golf courses on a list like this? Well, possibly because you want people in certain locales to feel that terrorism threatens them and their children more personally than it actually does. Then, when the miniature golf course isn't blown up, people can say "Look what a good job Bush did protecting me!"

And why wouldn't you put major sites on the list, ones that might actually be under threat? Beats me. Maybe they were so busy devising psychologically manipulative sites that they didn't get around to listing the real ones. Or maybe they don't care, or are incompetent. Maybe there's no money left for real security measures, or the money's earmarked for something else...maybe they need it to defend Christmas against leftist slander, or to fight laws against dumping sewage in drinking water.