Political Purposes

Check out this interesting and well-researched chart that details Bush's approval ratings and their relation to terror alerts. It's pretty interesting - alerts seem to always come when Bush's rating is plummeting, and then his approval seems to get a bump upwards. But as time goes on, alerts become more frequent and have less and less effect, as his approval ratings continue to plummet. Is it the Bush who cried Wolfowitz syndrome? Are people getting fed up?

Coming on the tail of several suspiciously timed alerts in the past few months - one the day after Kerry announced Edwards as his running mate, another right after Kerry's acceptance speech - one has to start to question the political motivation of these alerts. After all, in both cases, Homeland Security admitted that the announcements weren't based on new evidence. If there wasn't anything new to announce, why report it?

My predication and hope is that, as a country, our reaction will continue to change. At first the reaction of these terror alerts was fear. Now it seems the reaction is turning into indifference. Soon, the reaction will be anger - that the government is manipulating its people for such blatantly political reasons. By that point, hopefully, we'll have a new, less sleazy president.

Or, Bush could get a hummer from an intern. That always gets the American public riled up!

--opus

posted by opus  at 5:21 PM