BIll Frist
Loath as I am to make predictions about almost anything,
having missed every prediction I’ve made in the last year from my homies’ (the
Pittsburgh Steelers’) victory in the Super Bowl to the price of a gallon of gas,
I am also a big believer in that old saw about the past being prologue. So it is
with some fear and trepidation that I make the following prediction: There will
be a terrorist attack, or at least dire warnings about one, in this country,
sometime within the next several months (and certainly before the November ’06
mid-term elections) .
The circumstances are ripe either for another terrorist
attack or for the removal of the cobwebs from
the terrorist warning system. No, it’s not because our preparedness for an
attack is non-existent, because security at our ports (both sea and air) has
been shown to be about as tight as a sieve, because FEMA has been shown to be
utterly incompetent, or even because our National Guard, which would have to
respond in the event of a domestic terrorist attack, has been
decimated by its repeated deployment to Iraq. It’s because the political
climate dictates a return to a tactic that’s been successful for this
administration in the past.
With the president at an all-time low in popularity, and an
all-time high in disapproval, the Republican party in a shambles (thanks, in
part to the Dubai ports debacle), and the country starting to believe that
Democrats are
more worthy of confidence on the Republicans’ go-to issue of national
security, there is only one thing that will save the President, and his party: a
terrorist attack, or at least sounding the alarm bells that one is imminent.
It’s no secret that
the terrorist alert/warning system has been manipulated to benefit the
popularity rating of the administration. In a well-documented study of the
confluence of political conditions and the issuance of terrorist warnings,
entitled “The Nexus of Politics and Terror,” Keith Olberman, the articulate host
of the MSNBC show “Countdown,” revealed on the show, and in a
posting on his blog that on at least 13 occasions, the issuance of terrorist
“alerts,” had coincided with events he called “political downturns” for the Bush
administration. He summarizes the findings by saying:
But, if merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions
of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions
to be asked in this country – questions about what is prudence, and what is
fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and
which is the terror of threat.
Let’s not forget the effect the Bin Laden tape that was
revealed (again, no doubt fortuitously) just before the 2004 presidential
election had on the outcome of that election.
Even President Bush has acknowledged that probability.
It continues to amaze me that, despite the overwhelming
evidence of this administration’s incompetence in the “war on terror,” the
country has, at least until recently, continued to believe that Bush is their
man when it comes to protecting them from a terrorist attack. I commented about
this in an earlier piece entitled “Who
You Gonna Call,” in which I said:
But how stupid do you have to be to believe that a man who’s demonstrably
incapable of prosecuting a successful campaign to bring down (“dead or alive”)
our avowed “Public Enemy Number One,” [Bin Laden] is the man for the job, or
worse, that even if we’re attacked again, he still deserves to be considered our
protector. How many more times do we really need to be fooled?
And so, with
the prospect that the Republicans will be brought down in the upcoming elections
by their, and their leader’s, tanking popularity ratings, the imminence of
additional disclosures of ethical scandals in the Congressional (read:
Republican) bribery investigations (read: Abramoff), the likelihood that Patrick
Fitzgerald will bring his other shoe down, hard, on Karl Rove in the continuing
“Plamegate” investigation, and the general implosion by spontaneous political
combustion of the Republican party as we know it, the harbingers are clear. The
only thing that may save Bush and his party is their time-tested go-to tactic:
Be afraid, be very afraid.
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