Put this in your next ad promoting Las Vegas: We’re a huge terrorist target, come and have a blast

Money can’t buy a good reputation, but it sure can buy a lot of toys for bureaucrats to play with.

And that is what is important to our local elected officials who are upset that Las Vegas has fallen out of the top 30 cities most likely to be attacked by terrorists, according to a Homeland Security ranking that is used to dole out federal tax dollars to local jurisdictions to buy gadgets to be used to prevent such an event. Homeland dropped Las Vegas’ ranking as terrorist target to 33rd, just out of the funding list.

Before

Wasn’t it only days ago that elected officials were talking about spending $9 million to attract tourists to Nevada?

The slogan “A World Within. A State Apart” still makes no sense, but sounds better than “A World-renowned Target, Soon to be Blown Apart.”

According to the Review-Journal, County Emergency Manager and Deputy Fire Chief Fernandez Leary has written a letter to Homeland Security explaining why terrorists would love to attack the city with its many hotels, big crowds and nearly 40 million visitors a year.

Leary writes, the paper says, that the Las Vegas area:

“has long been considered a highly attractive terrorist target” since the discovery that five of the 19 terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had visited the city. Leary also cites videotape seizures in 2002 of suspected al-Qaida operatives that show footage of several resorts, including Mandalay Bay, Excalibur, MGM Grand and New York-New York.

That footage was later played in a post-9/11 federal trial of a possible terrorist cell in Detroit, where one defendant called Las Vegas the “city of Satan.”

What self respecting terrorist could possibly resist? If a couple of pressure cooker bombs shut down Boston, imagine what would happen to Las Vegas and its vulnerable, tourism-dependent economy.

The R-J says Sen. Harry Reid also got into the act with a letter of his own, explaining, “Hundreds of thousands of people gather in large venues in Southern Nevada every day,” adding that the city is near Nellis and Creech Air Force bases and the Nevada National Security Site where atomic bombs were tested.

Why are none of these people exclaiming: Las Vegas, safer than 32 other cities you could visit.

But, no, it’s all about the money, no matter what message they send to potential tourists and would-be terrorists.

After?