Al Qaeda's barrel-scrapers continue to be portrayed as capable of posing a huge threat to this country. Now virtually destroyed by US operations, a handful of al Qaeda pismires in a couple of dirt poor countries continue to putter with things that don't work. For al Qaeda, a brilliant bomb maker is someone who makes weapons that either don't work, fail painfully in the dirty linen of a feeble-minded lackey, or are given straight to the enemy.

So yesterday, the Associated Press showed the world how desperate and low on capability the terror organization is. Al Qaeda is working on new (!) and improved (!) underwear bombs for people who are cretins or mentally ill, possibly both, to carry, it was said:

The CIA foiled a plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner around the one-year anniversary of the killing of its former leader Osama bin Laden ...

American officials said the plot involved a bomb with a design that upgraded the underwear bomb taken aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. That explosive device failed to detonate ...

The AP reports the improved bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism, but was still intended to be hidden in a passenger's underwear ...

In an exclusive meeting, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that Hassan al-Asiri -- the so-called "master bomb-maker" for al-Qaida in Yemen -- posed the single most dangerous threat to the United States ...

"The single most dangerous threat to the United States," huh? Someone who makes bombs that either do not work or which are promptly handed over to the United States because the terror group is infiltrated with informers? Yeah, right.

The thought immediately occurs the US government leaked the story at this time for the express purpose of humiliating al Qaeda.

Think about it for a moment. The printer cartridge bombs, explosives that did not work, were obviously developed in part because al Qaeda has a demonstrated problem with reliability in its personnel. For example, the web biography of the first underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is the very picture of someone you wouild expect to fail. And he did, burning his private parts.

"As I get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and I struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze [in the presence of unveiled women] ... And this problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused, reads one of his musings, stored at Wikipedia..

Since women don't care for the simple-minded that much, perhaps enlisting in al Qaeda was his only choice.

"Officials said they believed that the new device was the work of the group's skilled bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who has long been a target of American counterterrorism efforts," reads one story, today in the New York Times.

In 2012, a "'skilled" enemy is someone who's plots go nowhere, someone who is undone by one of his hand-picked jihadis, anyone who can conveniently provide an argument for stepping up the bombing in Yemen.

Hassan al-Asiri, Umar Farouk Mutallab -- where on earth does al Qaeda find such innovative men of action?

Nayway, this next one is not a trick question: What constitutes a greater security threat to the vanishing middle class of the United States, an underwear bomb or mass unemployment and a staggering economy in which whole majorities are disenfranchised?

Go out to Dick Destiny blog and leave your answers.

The news of the foiled plot, besides exposing al Qaeda's inability, also serves in the task of getting stupid people, of which there is no shortage, to believe an entire country can be threatened by poverty-stricken nincompoop Islamic terrorists with ever more ineffective and pathetic plans. The logic in it sort of like the saying that a non-functioning watch is right two times a day, so eventually, chance may dictates that one day in the future al Qaeda will get lucky. Or maybe not.

However, it must be hard to recruit good foot soldiers because many have not only grasped the idea that the underwear bomb will only hurt the wearer terribly before failing but that it is also apparently more profitable to work as an informer.

al Qaeda's last failed bomb plot, set to the UPS logistics song.