The First Red Alert of the Season

The Bush administration's skills at manipulating the public are unsurpassed. Their virtuosity outstrips anything that has ever been seen, ever. I suppose it comes from Karl Rove -- they know how to turn public opinion off and on like throwing a light switch.

The ultimate example, in my mind, is the "terror alert." This color-coded scheme serves no function but to control the level of public anxiety. When the public is anxious, of course, they are more likely to cling to authority, to follow directions and keep their mouths shut, they will be hesitant to make changes -- all things that make life easier for the administration. But you can't keep them on pins and needles forever; sometimes you have to let them catch their breath, if only to make the next panic attack more effective. There needed to be a method for turning the emotional temperature down as well as up.

Really, you don't think there is any other reason to announce the "terror threat level," do you? What are people supposed to do -- pay more attention? Yeah, sure, to what? It is cognitively impossible to pay more attention, the concept is meaningless.

Never mind that the chances that Joe Blow is going to catch a terrorist, that the one correct suspicion is going to stand out from a gazillion false alarms, is ... zip.

The real message, if anyone was paying attention, is that the many agencies responsible for protecting our security are incompetent; they know there are bad guys but don't have any more idea than the average citizen as to where the bad guys are. Or who they are. The reaction is that the citizen walks around in a cloud of mistrust, eyeing his neighbors, people on the street, strangers across the aisle on a train, as dangerous threats. The result is anxiety only, with no increase in security.

And it works. You could almost hear the diabolical laughter coming from the White House before the 2004 elections, when public opinion went up and down as the administration wished, simply at the announcement of a new "threat level." The terror alert raised propaganda to a new level.

You might not have noticed that the terror alerts stopped abruptly after the last elections. Just stopped cold. You didn't see them on TV, hear about them on the radio, read about them in the newspaper. Nobody talked about them, we just lived without them.

Until now.

Well, there is another election coming.

And you saw what happened in Connecticut. It appears that the American voter may be getting a little hard to control. This week they insisted on electing the wrong guy as the Democratic nominee. (HERE is the NYT reporting that Dick Cheney said Lieberman's loss "might encourage 'al Qaeda types.'")

Something had to be done.

RED ALERT!!!

WASHINGTON - The U.S. government raised its threat warning to the highest level for commercial flights from Britain to the United States early Thursday in response to a terror plot disrupted in London. Terrorists had targeted United, American and Continental airlines, two U.S. counterterrorism officials said.

In addition to the highest alert for flights from Britain, the alert for all flights coming or going from the United States was also raised slightly. The government banned beverages, hair gels and lotions from flights, explaining only that liquids emerged as a risk from the investigation in Britain.
...
It is the first time the red alert level in the Homeland Security warning system has been invoked, although there have been brief periods in the past when the orange level was applied. Homeland Security defines the red alert as designating a "severe risk of terrorist attacks."

OK, America, here's the question: just how gullible are you?