WTF Is It Now?!?

"The public is not fooled by Bush's terror alert ruse"

(snip) New York did respond, loudly, to this week's terror alert, in a way that Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney can hardly have intended. Not with mere stoicism, but with a vocal and near-unanimous condemnation of Washington for issuing pointlessly vague warnings in a transparent attempt to deflect attention from the Bush administration's own failings in the months before September 11.

Commentators across the political spectrum agreed. Outside New York, the Washington Times - a conservative daily owned by the Moonies - declared outright that the warnings were intended "to mute criticism" over the handling of the "Phoenix memo", which warned of the dangers of potential terrorists training at US flight schools. Not a difficult conclusion to reach when presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, in a candid aside, had just explained that the alerts were issued "as a result of all the controversy that took place last week."