In the maze of your post-Christmas high triglyceride haze, you probably would have put the terrorist attempt on the back burner if it weren't for the relentless repetition of the same three pieces of news on your TV all weekend about the Nigerian national who tried to blow up the plane to Detroit.

The paradox is, the people who like President Obama the least are the ones who needed him the most when this all happened - without him to use as a punching bag, they would have to dig up real stories to talk about every night.

Bu the thing is, we're Americans.

So since the plane didn't blow up, we as a nation did what we always do - go on red alert for a day or so in our minds, and then move on to the next thing, which in this case was another big plate of that Christmas bar-be-que and a couple of shots of that Yuletide cognac. That doesn't mean we didn't think it was serious. It's just how we cope with stuff in 2009.

But the C-list chatterers were on the clock this weekend, and they tried to do what they do best - imitate the A-list commentator's techniques. They tried to tell you why the president should have hauled his narrow ass back to the White House pronto to stand in front of a presidential seal and say the magic words that would signal to the world that America is still the king of the jungle. The magic words that would signal to the entire country, including the half that doesn't think he should be president and the ten percent who don't want to believe he's even American, that they are going to be alright because he says we are.

The irony is, in the city of Detroit there are many people who know the smell of domestic terror, who get to see it up close and personal everyday. They know that speechifying against terror of any kind is a waste of time. They understand implicitly that arming their neighborhood police with more guns and more dogs is about as useful in rooting out domestic terrorists as arming combat soldiers with more tanks and more rockets to blow up piles of rocks is in rooting out foreign terrorists.

By the time the president comes on TV to talk about this in the next few days, just about the time you start to miss all of that good eating you did last week, he will have some facts in hand. He will have had time to think about the options that are available, and whether or not structural chaanges are needed in how we look at airport security.

In other words, he might just have time to do something more useful than frowning at a camera, which is all he would have done last week.