"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."
- Vice President Dick Cheney
Well, it turns out he was correct!
You may well ask how I know that the United States has been made safer by having elected Bush for another term and the answer is quite simple:
Since reelecting Bush, we have had a new video tape by bin Laden, we've had lasers pointed into plane cockpits, and we've just completed three major holidays without any apparent need for the Homeland Security color-coded terror alert system to be raised from yellow to orange.
So, we must be safer!
In fact, just a little over a week after Bush was reelected, the federal government lowered the terror alert status from orange to yellow for a number of financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. which had been raised to orange in August (less than 3 months before the election).
Moreover, it was just in July of this year (right after Kerry made news by announcing the popular choice of Senator Edwards as his running mate) that we had been warned by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge of a plot to carry out a large-scale terror attack against the United States in the near future that was being directed by Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda members.
Ridge announced that the planned attack is "an effort to disrupt the democratic process" before November's elections.
Bush appointee DeForest Soaries, Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, even went so far as to express his concern that no federal agency had the authority to postpone an election. He even asked Ridge to ask Congress to give his commission such power.
And, just four days before the November elections, a bin Laden video was released (acknowledged by a GOP strategist as a "little" gift" to Bush), yet the obvious power of a Bush/Cheney ticket seemed to be enough to repel the need for any concern to issue a real security alert (which could have frightened citizens concerned with the "gay menace" away from the polls). "We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official, but they were keeping us safe enough not to need to raise alarms unduly.
We had many orange level alerts prior to the election as you can see from this chart (you''ll need to ignore the distracting correlation with Bush popularity stats -- sorry -- it was the only graph I could find):
(A larger version can be found HERE.)
But now that Bush has been duly elected for another four years, there's no getting around the fact that officially recognized terror threats against the US are disappearing a fast as Kerry's lead after the exit polls were revised by CNN in the wee hours of 11/3/2004.
OK, so there was one little county in Ohio that may or may not have had a terrorist threat against it on election day and felt the need to lock down the administration building on election night when counting the ballots, but that seems to be an anomaly and all's well that ends well anyway.
All, I'm saying is that is that numbers don't lie and neither do colors: no orange means I feel safer and so should you.
The Republic is officially safe.
Any real American can see that and feel good about Bush being in office for another four years!
(Note: This is my first diary, so be gentle. And, yes, my tongue is firmly implanted in my cheek with this entry.)