How stupid do they think we are? Only hours after our much-praised Secretary of State is revealed to have been using material plagiarized from a college student to justify why we're going to kill thousands of people with bombs, our government issues a terror alert and expects us to believe it?

And how stupid are we? We believe it.

Everybody takes it seriously even though Colin Powell has been shown to have perpetrated a colossal lie before the entire world, sitting in front of the assembled multitude of rectitude at the United Nations, exposed as having tried to pass off a decade-old college post-graduate thesis as supposedly cutting-edge Department of Defense intelligence. Used before the most august leaders of the world, this is supposed to be the best we can do? For all that money in the defense budget?

I mean, shouldn't we be embarrassed to be caught in such a childish lie? Could the U.S. government have reached a new low in their sluggish and unintelligent efforts to convince the world it should bomb everything that doesn't "love our freedom?"

But it didn't matter. The American people have become such dullards that apparently nobody made the connection concerning lying about the reasons for bombing Iraq and lying about the terror alert. Certainly not the TV news robots.

Stupidest of all? The terror alert was meant to cover up the Secretary of State's very own sophomoric faux pas, but the piggies needn't have bothered.

The TV anchorpeople, who worry a lot more about their hair than they do the fate of the world, didn't even blink an eye, didn't even make the connection, that if Powell is fabricating evidence culled from the out-of-date research — the grad student's work was assessing conditions in Iraq more than a decade ago — then what possible evidence could this most "humane" member of the Bush Cabal of Death have been using to suddenly whip up a new terror alert — which served no greater purpose than to take the world's focus off his own obvious incompetence and insincerity.

His own lies. There could be no clearer evidence that the United States is lying — not only about its own objectives but also about its own methods, its own performance — and, as I'm sure our genuine enemies would notice, and most dangerous of all — its actual capabilities. There may be no doubt that the U.S. could totally vaporize Baghdad, and no doubt that America's demonic weapons of mass destruction have turned large swaths of Third World countries into radioactive wastelands, but there are real doubts that this two-faced gang of armchair cutthroats have the ability, the will or the intent to defend our country.

Just look at the investigation into 9/11, the biggest crime in American history, and let me know if you see one. Just look at Enron, the biggest robbery in American history, and let me know if you see the big perps being brought to justice.

Lies. Everywhere you turn are lies, couched in trite buzzphrases, uttered by incompetent functionaries like Ashcroft, who couldn't even make a decent middle school debate team, not to mention Bush, who will never learn that sincere statements later learned to be false mean you can never reach people again.

Or maybe you can. Maybe people don't really care if the world is destroyed, if their own sons return to the Fatherland contaminated by radioactivity and poison vaccines. The insincerely enraptured media suckups, who have their own challenges to overcome, insist Bush is popular, but average people at the shopping center now only say that if they think the Homeland Security camera is on them.

Lies. Like the new information about the Patriot missiles that the U.S. has sold to practically every country that wanted one. During the first Gulf War massacre, the Pentagon claimed a 100 percent kill-ratio against those evil Scud missiles launched by Saddam. Now the news is the Patriot missiles never hit a single Scud, or that the kill-ratio was somewhere in the range of 7 percent, at best.

Just like the phony U.S. missile tests we see in the news every now and then. Those missiles can't hit spit unless there's a GPS beacon in the target. But the well-coiffed media harlots always reports those tests as if they were some actual triumph of technology, rather than the totally bogus corporate political propaganda they are. Speaking of that, did you hear Raytheon, the company that made the Patriot missiles, was also hired to evaluate their performance, for a cool half million? It's the Arthur Andersen principle, still working fine.

Our genuine enemies — as opposed to the ones cooked up at CIA secret meetings and funded covertly by third parties (are you listening, Bob Graham?) — must be noticing that a Patriot missile couldn't hit a mule in the ass with a banjo.

Just like the phony scripted news alerts on CNN that don't mean anything, either — they just condition people to ignore all news alerts — all this talk about terror alerts reveals to our genuine enemies that we are all bluster without competence, all talk and no game, not to mention genuine toughness. Living the soft life of the complacent West, we rely on our high-tech toys to do our killing for us, and when those toys don't work, those softie Western soldiers have a real problem, like crashing their own helicopters or bombing their own allies because they're doing too many drugs. Too bad the war on drugs doesn't work on the drugs used for war.

The only reason for this terror alert was to take the focus off Powell's laziness, his unprofessional reliance on a British report that was nothing more than verbatim excerpts from an out-of-date war college paper, which he passed off as the best the American government could produce about its knowledge of what is really going on in Iraq. An utterly pathetic and incompetent performance by a government that has received a permanent free pass from uncritical media stooges.

These stooges are fakes themselves, and so is Powell, and so are his terror alerts. And by their belief in all these false statements — these fake terror alerts — so are the American people, who have become, in the eyes of so many innocents abroad, the scourge of the earth, for their misinformed malice and imbecilic indifference.

The biggest terror alert of all — 9/11 — was an event manufactured by the very people who are supposed to be our leaders, our benefactors, not our plunderers. Don't argue — the evidence is plentiful, despite the stalled official investigation. Now, the biggest worry becomes the matter of when they will decide we need another dose to convince us we are in danger and they are our saviors.

9/11 occurred at a time when the cabal was devising new and draconian restrictions on our freedom called the Patriot Act, which was passed shortly after that disaster. Now comes word that a new Patriot Act II has been devised in secret.

Can we make the connection between the act of writing the new rules for totalitarian control and the horrendous act necessary to justify its imposition? And can we make it in time?

Not likely, because we're as stupid as they think we are.


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John Kaminski lives and writes on the coast of Florida while watching the destruction of civilization by shallow and insincere men who don't tell the truth most of the time and don't really care that they don't.