Let's Send Tom (Color Charts) Ridge back to Penna and turn his all-scare-all-the-time bullshit meter OFF

Lowcountry NOW: It's time to stop crying wolf 01/09/04

By John David Rose
for the Carolina Morning News

A door-to-door salesman comes to your house selling elephant inhibitors guaranteed to keep you safe from elephants. You ask, "How do I know it works?" He responds, "You don't see any elephants, do you?"

A senior administration official was asked if all of these groundings and searches of foreign airliners had turned up any terrorists. He replied: "I don't think we know yet, and we may never know."

So how many planes does the U.S. have to ground and search fruitlessly for terrorists before people begin to dismiss us as hopelessly paranoid?

Poor Homeland Security. It has an impossible task.

They have to constantly warn us that terrorists are about to do something terrible just in case something happens.

But the more they warn us without something happening - crying "wolf" - the less people respect their warnings.

The current administration, however, has good reason to keep the American people apprehensive. Keep the terrorist pot boiling and perhaps people will be less inclined to change leaders at the next election.

Heaven help G.W. Bush if the American public finally wakes up to how badly it has been hoodwinked, and at what a horrendous cost in American lives.

It won't be too long before Bush's war on Iraq will have killed more Americans than the al-Qaida attack on the Twin Towers. It's certainly killed a lot more innocent Iraqis and Afghans who had had nothing to do with 9/11.

To distract us from the mounting cost of his war, Bush and his administration feed us a continual diet of terrorist threats.

Does he think that Americans are spineless? Why else would he and his minions treat us like children?

First he raised the specter of an Axis of Evil, Bush's comic-book characterization of three minor and terribly poor nations who want only to feed their people, not hurt us.

Then he built a minor-league despot, Hussein, into this mythical beast supposedly armed to the teeth with imaginary nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Anthrax, smallpox, dirty bombs - weapons our own military labs stockpile by the ton - are regularly trotted out as reasons to trade our Bill of Rights for Ashcroft's Bill of Wrongs.

Enough already of this fear-mongering. Here's what a real leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said to the American people in the midst of a real threat to our country, the Great Depression:

"This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Forget the rainbow of alerts. We might be attacked, or we might be hit by a tornado or some right-wing nut with a gun. As the bumper-sticker says: Stuff Happens.

We aren't much of a country if we're always looking over our shoulder for something that might get us.

Let's get back to work rebuilding respect for ourselves and our heritage of courage. Let's try to regain the respect of other nations that Bush squandered with his posturing and bullying.

It's time to put real leadership back in the White House.

John David Rose is a long-time Hilton Head Islander and a political observer.