For me, those terror threat warnings are an enduring mystery. The level goes up and down seemingly without relationship to events in the real world, only secret intelligence reports that we never see. It's not unreasonable to wonder if we aren't being jerked around for political (or broadly speaking, tactical) reasons. When things go badly at the UN or there are protests against Bush's war, you can almost count on the threat level being raised as an argument that we're being threatened.

Or maybe our security forces are doing such a great job that every threat is real and every threat is thwarted. Maybe. But that would represent a dramatic turnaround from the performance prior to 9/11. You'd expect, against that history, that the government would be eager to publicize every success, to haul each scruffy terrorist down the perp walk in front of the cameras. Where are they?

I know, it'd be dangerous to become complacent. Demonstration of the threat would be rather painful. That's what makes the possibility of political manipulation so wicked--we have no defense against it.

It boils down to whether you trust Bush. That's easy for the people who voted for him, because they have a vested interest in being proven right. But it doesn't work for the 51% who didn't vote for Bush, and the other 6.25 billion people on the planet who didn't participate in his election. It really isn't hard to understand why the protests and the resistance from foreign governments have taken on a personal tone. It really is all about Bush.

(Lest it seem like I'm drifting off-topic into criticizing Bush [again], the point is that the credibility of the terror warnings depends on your willingness to trust Bush in the absence of objective evidence to support the warnings.)

One other point, about the price we'll pay for Bush's war. Have you noticed the correlation between bellicose rhetoric from the Bush Regime and the reaction of the stock market? Like clockwork, Bush and the Boys pound their chests, and the market takes a nosedive. People give all sorts of answers to opinion polls based on irrelevant considerations like peer pressure and a desire to appear patriotic; you get a better picture by watching how people behave and particularly how they "vote their pocketbooks". Whether or not we pay a price in the currency of terrorist attacks, we will assuredly pay a heavy economic price, directly and indirectly. A lot of people, particularly people in financial industries who tend to be hard-headed conservatives, understand this.

--Robert