Bush and the wolf

Newsday.com - Jimmy Breslin

Kerry could have been been doing the least bit better in polls.

Every time something like that happens, Bush stumbles or a 9/11 report comes out to make him look bad, he cries 'terrorist.' He has done this for over two years now.

This time, a great bin Laden target in New York was the Citigroup Center on Lexington Avenue. You could be incinerated if Osama gets at this building!

Right away in the morning, George Bush's wife and daughters rushed up from Washington to stand bravely in the front of all those cameras. It was not for the election. They truly wanted to stand with New Yorkers and be incinerated, the same as anybody else.

It probably was the one most fraudulent act we have had since the World Trade Center bombing, and at that time, Bush himself got up on a destroyed fire engine and pretended to be tough. While not saying that he froze during the attack.

Here is Bush's latest intelligence from his intelligence agents: George Bush tells us that once upon a time bin Laden measured our inclines in parking garages. Oh, Lord, call out the troops!

The terrorists had records of the inclines of underground garages in big New York buildings. The TV announcers read this with wide, fearful eyes...

In several related pieces of news Bush/Rove may have blown the cover of a Pakistani undercover agent (the Onion predicted this, I guess one CIA agent wasn't enough [1]) and the Brits are fed up with politically motivated terror alerts.

My impression is that the alert wasn't entirely faked. It sounds like we've had a burst of good intel recently. I suspect there were grounds for an alert. The way the alert was handled, however, was ALL politics -- nasty, rotten, dirty Rovian politics.

The worst part is that Bush, by using a genuine terror alert to serve his electoral agenda, has turned a warning into a wolf cry. His credibility, near zero outside of 50% of the American public, is moving into negative terrain.

[1] The Onion had Bush blogging on an iMac. Since one of Bush's first acts was to end the antitrust action against Microsoft, a large campaign donor, it's unlikely he'd be using a Mac for his blog.