Kit Bond: There are smart terrorists and there are dumb terrorists

The conservative magazine, Human Events, has interviewed various senators about the leak of the terrorist financing tracking program which, by the way, the Wall Street Journal now says was actually an authorized leak.

Senator Kit Bond had this to say:

Sen. Kit Bond (R.-Mo.): … I think that we ought to find out who their sources are, because whoever leaked them is guilty of a felony, and this felony is compounded by the publication, which has now made our country significantly less safe.

You had said this applies the theory of Darwinism to terrorists. Can you explain that?

Bond: Yeah. Michael Hayden, who was the head of the NSA program and is now director of our CIA, came before our committee to testify in his confirmation hearings. I asked him, “What has been the impact of all these disclosures?” And that was before the terrorist financing [story], [and after the reporting of the] terrorist surveillance program. … He said: “We are applying the Darwinian theory,” you know, survival of the fittest? The Darwinian theory says we are not going to get very smart terrorists now because the only terrorists we are going to be able to capture are the dumb terrorists who don’t pay attention to what’s been on the television, on the website, learning about all of the ways in which we track their activity.

So this ups the stakes?

Bond: Oh, yes. We may catch some dumb terrorists, but the smart terrorists say, “Oh, well, they can listen in on these calls, so we’ll call from a different phone.” And now they know most of how we track the money, so they will find other flows. So that means that the vitally, vitally, vitally important programs that we’ve had have now been blown.

So, the 'smart' terrorists didn't even consider that someone might be listening in on their phone conversations or tracking their money until US newspapers printed these stories - even though Bush has repeatedly said that his administration would do everything it its power to hunt them down?

Does that 'Darwinian theory' apply to senators as well? Will some Republicans just evolve their way right out of congress this fall? Stay tuned...

Update: And just how does a Republican senator who thinks that a belief in evolution corrupts children suddenly find himself accepting Darwinian theory anyway?

Members of the oxymoronic "Christian left" might do well to read the good senator's sermonizin' on the Web. Check out, for instance, the site of the Arkansas-based Leadership Training Institute of America, which helps prepare Christian youth for the godless outside world. The site includes an essay that Bond penned in 1999 about an America sans Jesus. "We are losing our youth to humanism, new age thought, the punk culture, and the subsequent moral relativism, sexual promiscuity, rebellion, and belief in evolution," Bond wrote. "Kids corrupt before their parents' eyes. Young people raised in church are abandoning the teachings of their churches, the Bible, and Christ. Students who attend college often return anti-Christian."

Hmm...has the good senator transmutated since then?