Remain Calm.

This Mark Fiore Flash Cartoon sums up the administration's fearmongering pretty accurately. You know, it's nothing more than an old Leninist trick. You perpetuate your own power by perpetuating the revolution. There's a reason why Castro keeps telling Cubans that a US invasion is imminent, and that the forces of counterrevolution lurk around every corner. If he told people that those types of threats didn't exist, the citizens would take a harder look at their miserable, Stalinist existence and start asking some pretty "counterrevolutionary" questions. (That's why the travel ban & Bush's crackdown thereupon, and the ongoing embargo are so bleeding counterproductive to any sort of democratic change in Cuba). We didn't stop trading with: Russia Poland Czechoslovakia Yugoslavia East Germany Romania Bulgaria China (post-1972) Just because they were Stalinist dictatorships. Why should Cuba be any different? We didn't embargo those countries into pluralistic, free-market democracies. It was our way of life that helped that transformation come about. And our way of life was symbolized by little things like blue jeans, Led Zeppelin, and Coca-Cola. The longer we deny Levi's, CDs and Cokes from the Cuban people, the longer they'll be trapped in a stifling Stalinist tropical gulag. Which brings us back to Bush & Co. 9/11 happened, and it's the worst attack on our soil since who-knows-when. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, that the Iraq war can properly be described as a fiasco, and that the war in Afghanistan has been largely ignored and remains incomplete, it seems that the announcement of a generalized terrorist threat (oftentimes with no movement on the good old alert scale) comes on the heels of some unimpressive Bush-Cheney poll numbers. Kerry's up 5 points, and he's picked his running mate? Send Ridge out to warn us about an incomplete threat of terror to coincide with the election. As Fiore says, we may have to disrupt the democratic process because the terrorists want to disrupt the democratic process.