Playing Politics with National Security

It's not like we didn't know already, just based on Bush's win-at-all-costs-my-career-is-more-important-than-America M.O. But as everyone was saying at the time, we now have proof that Bush kept raising the terror alert level just to frighten dummies (a.k.a. - his fanbase) into voting for him.

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

And it's not like Ridge is a man of honor or scruples. If he tried to stop them, you know it was particularly egregious.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?'"

That kid's frisbee fell over the White House fence, and John Kerry jumped 2 points in the polls! ORANGE ALERT!!

What's overlooked in this article is the fact that when we go on orange alert, it costs a lot of money to local governments. Not the federal government. It might be a bit of a boy-who-cried-wolf joke to us now, but whether your local police department thinks it's a joke or not, they all go on overtime, we start deploying national guard troops, they install these cement blocks all around our famous NYC landmarks. It costs a small fortune for every day the country is on high alert.

So, Bush might be proud of himself that he used our national security apparatus to further his own ends. Hey - plenty of world leaders have done that before. But the result is fire stations shut down, underfunded schools, cancelled poverty programs, a poorly trained police force, basically anything that your local government should provide but can't pay for. If your roads are full of potholes, your library is shut down an extra day each week now, or the big one, higher local taxes - you can thank George W. Bush.

**insert wild-eyed rant about George Orwell here**