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Ah, where are real leaders with balls of steel when you need them?

Maybe it's just, I cast my eyes back on the last century ...

FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

... and I'm just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

Kung Fu Monkey is kicking ass and taking names.  Sometimes, you read a post and wish to hell that you had written it yourself.  This is one of those posts.

For the record, of course I'm worried about my safety and that of my family.  Of course we need to take all necessary precautions, support good police investigative work, recruit more human intel capability both here in the US and abroad, take whatever steps are necessary to shore up our homeland security (really shore it up, not just put a bandaid on a huge gaping hole and declare a PR victory)...you know, get our hands dirty and do some real work on the issues at hand.  All of us -- every single person in this nation of ours, pulling together.

But I'll be goddamned if I'm going to let Osama Bin Laden dictate how I live my life.

And I would appreciate it if the President of the United States would have the guts to do the same.  If you need me, I'll be living my life exactly like I did before...with a selected finger for the terrorists, and another for all those pantywaists who cower in the corner when they say boo. 

The Canadian press has picked up on the White House politicization of national security matters.  Even Margaret Carlson is making fun of the Bush Administration crying "wolf!" one too many times.  I'd say that the scare tactics are losing their lustre if Carlson is making fun of Bushie's inability to do anything but fail and Cheney's sneer.

In a survey published this month of 100 foreign policy experts, retired military officers, veteran intelligence officers, former secretaries of state and national security advisers there was a striking consensus across political lines. A bipartisan majority, 84 percent, say the U.S. is not winning the war on terror, and 86 percent see a world growing more dangerous. The U.S., they agree, is falling short in its homeland security efforts, according to the survey, which was conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy.

Against all that, Cheney is hoping he can sell the theory that Lieberman didn't lose because he's too close to a president who has further imperiled us. He also hopes the elections later this year don't turn on the question posed by Democrats, ``Do you feel safer than you did five years ago?''

Not really, no.  The grown-ups who actually know something about foreign policy and the long-term ramifications to American prestige and influence of continued failures in this arena are grading Junior with a big, fat F.  Do you trust the Bush Administration and the Rubber Stamp Do-Nothing Republican Congress to continue unfettered, running the country with little or no oversight, continuing their profligate spending ways with little to nothing to show for all that money pouring out of the treasury, after the last five years?  Me, neither.

Had enough? 

(PS -- Bob Geiger has the Saturday Cartoons up.  H/T to reader egregious for the heads up on the KFM post.  Great stuff.)