Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. While fear is much in vogue these days, it's never far from its colleagues in the unholy trinity of crass mass manipulation.

I have to admit that Bush demonstrates a deep mastery of FUD. The simple sentence "They jes' hate us!" manages to express the three pillars of FUD in just four words: "We must fear the terrorists because we can't make sense of them. Vote for me!".

I think that "Andromeda Strain" was a great first work by Crichton, but over the years his quality seems to have declined in direct proportion to his commercial success. The guy's such a commercial whore that his "novels" are really just fleshed-out screenplays, complete with scene breaks and stage directions. Michael Crichton, Inc., is a multimedia entertainment company focused on tie-ins and merchandising, not literary work, and most certainly, and most laughably, not scientific investigation.