Tom Ridge announced on Friday that we are bracing for a terrorist attack designed to disrupt our national election á la Madrid train bombing. If you missed this story don't feel bad, it was easy to miss. I was watching CNBC, my morning habit, and they had the live feed from the press conference. CNBC was bored, so they cut away after 5 minutes. I don't blame the media for not giving this story more attention, it's old news: terrorist attack, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Further, Tom Ridge looks and acts like the authoritarian that I've spent most of my life running from, think evil junion high assistant-principle or stick-up-ass boss. Democrats even questioned the Department of Homeland Security's motives saying that the White House is trying to maintain a national sense of fear to provide a boost for President Bush this November. What we have here is a case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Worse, we know our president lied to the world to settle his family's old score, give his cronies some kickbacks and pick up some oil. Now we're blasé about terrorism, which isn't such a bad thing, really. Do we really think that Tom Ridge, with his $10 gazillion new Homeland Security web portal is going to have any impact on a couple of fanatics with a truckload of explosive fertilizer and some radioactive hospital waste? We might as well walk around with big targets on our asses, fill out our last wills and say our goodbyes (the classified briefing on this is apparently very sobering). I have one piece of advice for Mr. Ridge: please stop referring to the United States as "The Homeland" -Ugh! that bristles my feathers! Oh and one more thing, drop the airport clusterfuck you've created. You're not doing one bit of good there except to quell the reptilian brains of the masses into thinking falsely that air travel is now impervious to terrorist attack, it isn't. Let's do away with the illegal search and seizure.
