Are you scared yet? As you have undoubtedly heard by now, a pair of car bombs were discovered in London yesterday. Authorities said both cars were Mercedes and the apparatus in both was the same: Canisters of propane and gasoline and nails. “These vehicles are clearly linked,” said a London police commissioner.

MSNBC covered it extensively yesterday, giving it nearly the whole hour during its Tucker Carlson and Chris Matthews shows and their late afternoon repeats. The story continues to lead on both CNN and MSNBC this morning.

(As I write this, MSNBC is reporting that a burning Jeep Cherokee just burst through the doors at an airport in Scotland. One source says that one of two Asian men in the car was also on fire. Another source says there was only one man in the car and he was apprehended by police. Here’s a link to the story on CNN.)

On MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, Keith Olbermann was having none of it. His guest for the segment was Larry Johnson, one of the former Republican CIA agents that Bush scared straight with the Iraq war and outing of secret agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

Johnson portrayed the would-be bombers as amateurs and doubted that the bombs could have caused the sort of catastrophic damage being hyped by the newsers. He also said that whether the would-be terrorists were Al Qaeda or just wanna-bes was nearly irrelevant.

In either case, and despite the fact the attacks were bungled, the attempts in London put the lie to the ridiculous theory that by attacking the terrorists “over there” (Iraq), we’re preventing them from attacking us “over here” — if “here” is defined as any English-speaking country that invaded Iraq.

Here’s a flavor what Johnson had to say about the thwarted bombings on his website, No Quarter:

You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed … If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur … the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel.

And:

A propane tank explosion makes a hell of a noise but does not create widespread shrapnel dispersion. Busted eardrums and broken glass are more likely. Getting these tanks to explode is difficult. The ones I have witnessed occurred when a house under construction caught on fire. But there is nothing in two 25lb propane tanks inside a Mercedes that will detonate with sufficient force to shred the automobile and send hundreds to meet their Allah, God, Buddha, or whatever

Finally:

Judging from the overreaction to this non-incident I think we can safely conclude that Osama Bin Laden will remain holed up in Pakistan and let the fear mongers at CNN, MSNBC, and FOX do the dirty business of scaring the shit out of people.

Why do the producers of cable news shows go wall-to-wall on non-stories like this? One, because they know their audience will watch it. And two, most of them live in New York or Washington, the two cities bin Laden hit on Sept. 11, 2001, and stories like this have a “there but by the grace of God go I” factor. (Many Californians have a similar morbid interest in earthquakes that happen elsewhere.)

One of the Bush administration’s fundamental tenets of governance is the fact that people are easier to manipulate when they are scared. The producers of cable news shows are either as oblivious to their collusion in this as they pretend to be, or they simply do not care.