Pesky Letter: The Bush Who Cried Wolf

A Pesky Letter to Michael Mukasey

Dear Attorney General Mukasey:

Imagine how surprised I was to read that you were “surprised at how surprised” you are at all that Terror that’s out there just waiting to kill us. You continued that "It's surprising how varied [the threat] is, how many directions it comes from, how geographically spread out it is.”

And whattaya know, you said all this right when the President of the Newnitted States is trying to ram an anti-Privacy Bill down willing beaks of Congress and the American people.

The beauty part is how you delivered your warning. Mikey. (May I call you Mikey? “Mr. Attorney General” sounds too formal for someone trying to make us crap our pants.) Anyway, CNN said you made the comment while “at an informal meeting” with reporters in your office.

Well, we all know how much the Bush administration likes to dish with members of the 4th Estate. No subterfuge there, certainly. Your timing was beautiful, too. It was a shot sent across the bow of U.S. American Christians just as they’re getting ready to celebrate Easter. Not so fast, Good Christians, you implied. There’s godless terror extant. Evildoers everywhere are making ready to bite the head off Peter Cottontail and poop in your Easter baskets.

“Details! Give us details and specifics,” the insider reporters most certainly shouted. No neophytes they, these are people who cut their journalistic Eye Teeth on the balderdash of Brittney, the prevarications of Paris, the fabrications of Federline.

“No you dih-uhnt,” you responded. You refused to offer details, specifics or Data. You let their imaginations stew along with their perceived status of insider privilege to great effect. This wasn’t some official pronouncement to get lost in the news clutter of a holiday weekend. No this was Scoop stuff—sure to be breathlessly reported.

And so, Mikey, you got to me. I’m sitting here with a clenched knot in my stomach, fearful that I’m gonna die, knowing as sure as Martha has Vandellas, there’s nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

There’s just one teensy, tiny little thing.

I don’t believe you.

Oh it’s not you, Mikey. You haven’t been in office long enough to build my distrust. It’s that guy you work for. He’s a—what’s the Euphemism for it?—oh, the hell with it, lets call a Spade a Spade—he’s a liar. How do we know when Bush is lying? When his lips move. (Okay, that’s not a new joke, but then Bush has been lying for a long, long time.)

It hasn’t taken you long to come up to speed with the way they do things in your boss’s administration, Mikey. After all, the President and his Crew are past masters at terrorizing the people they were elected to serve. They’ve been warning us that we’re all gonna die if we don’t do exactly what they tell us to do for quite some time now. As you know, the current focus is on a little piece of legislation called the FISA Bill.

Congress, under the delusion they were elected to govern the American populace too, want to have something to say about FISA. Some Americans even suspect our elected representatives are actually getting up on their hind legs and saying, “Hey, we’re part of the Constitutional process, too, Mr. President, I mean Sir, er, that is, Your Majesty….”

No Mikey, you are just the latest Bush surrogate being used to put the American citizenry in our place, said place being ducking, covering, and cringing under our desks. You have reached into the darkest corners our scared little psyches and addressed our reptilian brains directly. Your message is as clear as the Good Terminator’s warning to Sarah Connor: “Come (along) with me if you want to live.”

The tragedy of all this is there is Terror out there. There are plenty of bad guys who wish us ill. Some hate us because they are truly Evildoers; others hate us because they’ve been driven to it by the behaviors of the Bush Administration.

And if we let our guard down, it’s not because the American people, or Liberals, or those who oppose the President don’t have the backbone to stand up to the real terrorists. It’s because we’ve become deafened by Bush’s incessant plays upon our fears, offered not as fair warning, but to feed the President’s urge to consolidate his own power, and excuse his past behavior.

And as sure as I know that any future terrorist action will be blamed on anyone who stood up to Bush’s Politics of Terrorism, that’s how sure I am that the real blame falls on the Bush who cried Wolf.