Republican Boondoggles Continue

The Bush Administration in an effort to play politics with Homeland Security is cutting funding to New York City and Washington, D.C. and sending the money elsewhere. James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News provides us with his assessment (hat tip to Democratic Underground):

The Homeland Security bureaucrat who shortchanged New Yorkers' safety by $80 million implied yesterday that guarding a Nebraska cornfield from an Al Qaeda attack is the same as putting a cop with a gun on the Brooklyn Bridge.

"When you are protecting agriculture in the Midwest, you are protecting the citizens of New York City," Assistant Secretary Tracy Henke told C-Span's "Washington Journal."

Henke - a political appointee in charge of doling out $1.7 billion in security grants to cities under the highest threat of attack - cut funds to New York City and Washington by 40%, even though both are considered Al Qaeda's top terror targets.

(snip)

...Mayor Bloomberg told WABC Radio yesterday, "We certainly eat food from other states, but they are kind of hard for terrorists to go after, I would argue."

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington also scoffed at the insinuation that Al Qaeda is targeting cornfields and grain stores.

"The whole DHS agro-terrorism theory doesn't hold," the official said....

Welcome once again to the alternate universe of George W. Bush. The midterm elections are only five months away and all rational discourse has ceased on the Republican side of Washington.