Knee-knocking, slobbering, knuckle-cracking FEAR

it's all bush has and he's used it amazingly well...

[T]he Bush administration has in its arsenal one very potent weapon -- and one weapon only -- which it has repeatedly used: fear.

[...]

In a rational world, risk is equal to impact multiplied by probability. As the Linguasphere Dictionary puts it: "In professional risk assessment, risk combines the probability of a negative event occurring with how harmful that event would be." But the administration has spent four years urging Americans to ignore that way of thinking

But one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm and resolve -- the attributes that have always defined our nation as it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the opposite of strength.

Most people know individuals in their lives who live in this type of irrational, all-consuming fear -- people who are scared, pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution lest something go wrong. In its more extreme version, that sort of fear manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder

The Bush administration has been trying to reduce this country to a collective version of that affliction. And it is hard to imagine what a nation fueled by such fear can accomplish.

The administration has managed to get away with the Orwellian idea that fear is the hallmark of courage, and a rational and calm approach is a mark of cowardice. They have been aided in this effort by a frightened national media and political elite that lives in Washington and New York -- two "target-rich" cities -- and that has been so petrified of further attacks that they were easily pushed into a state of passive, uncritical compliance in exchange for promises of protection.

how long are we going to continue to fall for it...?

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