Bell Curve Politics

No, not the excreble Charles Murray nonsense, the ebb and flows of terror warnings which correlate strongly with potential Democratic Party ascendancy.

Atrios mentions this, this morning:

Tom Ridge's job for the last couple of years was to screech "Orange!" when told.

And I remember when pundits were "outraged!" over the possibility that someone would dare politicize that sacred day of 9/11.

Suckers and tools. The lot of them.

We saw this repeatedly throughout the election.

...in the buid up to the Democratic National Convention.

...just after the DNC when Kerry's numbers started to spike.

...pretty much whenever economic numbers were released.

It was purely and simply the manipulation of the public for the purpose of fear.

Oh sure, sadly about 45% of the American voters were going to support 'America Kickin' Ass!' no matter what. A rather sad pathology reflected in car magnets througout the country. But what the Bush reelection team was trying to accomplish was convince the fencesitters that could be scared into voting.

Well, for once "Mission Accomplished".

So today, after warning repeatedly about the potential for attacks upon the inauguration before November 2004, this:

Nine months later, the threat level has been lowered, and Ridge, speaking at a news conference last week, said there is no evidence of a plot to disrupt President Bush's inauguration. Previous warnings, Ridge explained, stemmed from threat reports tied to the elections -- not to the inauguration more than two months later.

There is nothing that we've seen, not just today, but over the period of the preceding several weeks, that gives us any reason to even consider, at this point, raising the threat level," Ridge said. "Normally, it's an aggregation of information we receive that we conclude is credible over a period of time. But there's absolutely nothing out there that would suggest we should even think about it."

The shift in rhetoric about the dangers posed by terrorists during the inauguration marks the latest retreat from last year's terrorism warnings, which, in retrospect, were based largely on faulty intelligence, dated information or -- as with the inauguration -- an educated guess.

Naturally, the Washington Post left out..."and a desire to scare the electorate into voting for Bush."

Now as we get closer to the congressional elections in 2006...

By the way, there are a lot of Americans in the Sudetenland.