Adam's blogbox: I refuse to live in the fear our sissy President says we should

Ever since 9/11, George Bush and Dick Cheney have been trying to convince me I should be scared.

Of what?

Terrorists. Ooh, terrorists. Those scary superbaddies. Fanged demons. Mindless monsters who are about to dirty-bomb me in my bed before breakfast.

What a load of Texas moonshine.

I actually live in New York City. I was here on 9/11, a mile away from the WTC, when Guard Duty Dodger Bush was sitting tongue-tied in a class of nursery school kids, and Five Deferments Cheney was cowering in his bunker.

I lived through the whole thing, and I’m not scared.

Why should I be scared? With my fellow New Yorkers, I went through the worst that Al-Qaeda can do. Later, I felt a weird solidarity with the good citizens of Bali, Madrid and London, who had to do the same.

And it’s a funny thing -- our lives go on. There are steaks to eat, wines to drink, and comely lasses and lads to bonk.

But Bush would have us believe the terrorists are circling out there like ghastly vultures with really badass intentions, armed with a deadly flu virus or something, or a handy portable nuclear device, which will surely cause the extinction of my precious life, or at the very least, tear a limb or two off my innocent torso.

What a load of Texan moonshine.

As far as I can see, the million-dollar “charity” chains that paid for terrorism have been totally disrupted. That big boogieman, Bin-Laden, is sitting like a useless bare-assed yogi in some faraway mountain cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border, with not much to do except smuggle out the occasional tape to Al-Jazeera.

Meanwhile Al-Qaeda fights on in Iraq under a wingnut called al-Zarkawi.

I’ve got to be scared of them? Please. Maybe Al Qaeda was something to be scared of when it had a whole country on its side, and educated Muslims with engineering degrees from Germany in its ranks, but today? They’re nothing but a bunch of skeevy desert rats. The last big Muslim eruption -- in France – caused no more damage than a grand torching of their own cars, and a well-deserved dent in Gallic smugness.

Hey, I’m not in Iraq. I’m not a poor slob of a US soldier, who has good reason to be afraid -- he has to rely on cheapskate Rumsfeld to supply him with the proper body armor or armored Humvee he needs to stay alive.

I’m not a journalist in Iraq either, going around asking questions at the risk of having my head sawed off on TV. If I were, I’d do what any respectable journalist does in Iraq to stay alive – sit tight in the Green Zone and send out my Iraqi surrogates to go and ask the questions to enable me to write up my story when they report back to me.

So, if I wouldn’t be scared as a journalist in Iraq, why should I be scared as a blogger in New York?

There is of course a reason why Bush wants me to be scared. He wants to turn me and the whole of America into a bunch of sissies, because then he can claim he will protect us.

Look, I wouldn’t want Bush on my side in a barfight, let alone as my big daddy protector.

If he wanted to protect me, he’d do something about surveillance at our harbors. You can bring in a huge nuclear bomb in a container through any seaport in America.

But first you have to have a nuclear bomb.

Listen, how are the terrorists going to get themselves a nuke? It takes whole nations with brigades of scientists a couple of decades to develop any nuclear capability. Some people say the terrorists could buy a bomb in Russia, where there are many nuclear bombs. But who’s going to sell them one? Putin isn’t that stupid. If you could buy a nuclear bomb in Russia, the Chechens would’ve bought one a long time ago and blown up Moscow.

The terrorist scare is a big old fake by a big old Yalie faker who isn’t even the pure Texan he fakes he is.

He wants to scare me into backing un-American, unmanly, unnecessary, big-bully tactics like torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless wiretapping -- as he tries to expand the office of the American President into some weird unconstitutional “unitary executive” big-bully King George thing.

Hell, if he could’ve scared me into dumping Social Security for “private accounts” (translation: let Wall Street play with Social Security), he would’ve tried that one, too. But he couldn’t, so of course it went nowhere.

Years ago, long before Bush started bugging us with his sissy strategy, I wasn’t scared when I was supposed to be scared of the Communists either. I knew that sissy tactic was just a big old fake so our government could go on all sorts of foreign adventures to bolster terrible regimes who’d cut our US corporations good deals in their oppressed countries.

That’s what US foreign policy has always been about: getting good deals for the US everywhere.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s damn patriotic.

But you don’t have to be scared to back US business. Just greedy. Nothing wrong with that either.

That’s why we went to war in Iraq, so King George and Warlord Cheney could give their oil buddies a nice-and-easy open-sesame to exploit Iraq’s oilfields. Also, they wanted to have a permanent military presence in a Middle Eastern country besides shaky Saudi-Arabia – some other country they could control via their own puppet regime (they had Chalabi in mind before Al-Sistani screwed up everything by insisting on elections).

The other reasons – WMD, Saddam’s connection to 9/11, spreading democracy – were all big old Texas moonshine fakery.

These days, trying to scare me is all Bush has got going for him. Somehow, being scared, being a sissy, is actually patriotic, he claims.

What a load of Texas moonshine.

The really weird thing is this: between Guard Duty Dodger George and Five Deferments Dick, they actually ARE scared. 9/11 blew their lunch out of their bellies into their pants, and their balls out of their scrotums into their throats. They were smart enough to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, but they were genuinely afraid.

There’s no one more afraid than a privileged, entitled dude who thinks his world has turned upside down. The day before 9/11, Bush and Cheney were acting like overseers on the plantation, tearing up international agreements, behaving all butch, bullying the world, and the next day, poof!

That’s how you get a sissy – start with a bully. Big bullies invariably become the sissiest sissies. That’s what Bush and Cheney are: big bullies turned into big sissies.

But the rest of us, Americans who have to fend for ourselves, who don’t have rich daddies and rich buddies to cover for us -- we don’t have to be scared, because we don’t have that much to lose.

Of course, there is a certain kind of American who scares easy, an American type on whom the sissy strategy works. I’m talking about those Americans who are like Bush and Cheney – natural-born bullies themselves.

They come in two versions. One is the hectoring, bullying, evangelist Pat Robertson type. The other is the hectoring, bullying, conservative talk radio Rush Limbaugh type. They’re our big public bullies, who like to pick on women, feminists, and homosexuals. They try to bully women about abortion and homosexuals about gay marriage.

Because they’re bullies, they fall easily for the sissy strategy. Heck, those are the same tactics they use against the rest of us. They tell us that gay marriage is this HUGE threat to us endangered straight species. Just think about it for a minute: they’re asking you and me to be scared of homosexuals. Say what? That’s got to be the stupidest sissy strategy in the universe.

I’ve got a message for the rest of us: we don’t have to follow our leaders into being sissies. Just because our President and VP are bullies-turned-sissies, doesn’t mean we Americans have to act like sissies, too. Say along with me: Mr. President, you’re a big old sissy. But hey, Mr. President, we Americans ain’t. So stop trying to scare us with your sissy strategy.

I know Karl Rove is going to try his sissy line on America one more time come November, mainly because he’s run out of all other options. But will it work again? It barely worked when that idiot Kerry ran against Bush.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to 2008, when we’ll see the last of our bully-turned-sissy president and his sissy misery of a sourpuss ass-for-a-face VP.

Enter John McCain or Hillary Clinton -- neither of whom are natural-born bullies who scare easy. They’re both remarkably free of the Bush-Cheney bully-sissy mentality; it’s just not in their nature to try another sissy strategy on us.

What a relief it will be -- NOT to have a sissy President who thinks it’s his job to scare America.