Dear Leader

***note*** What follows is an editorial piece pulled from print before publication, posted here in its entirety****

We're living in a very precarious moment in history. I don't mean to overstate the issue, and I do not. In fact, I've been known to confide to friends that while I am concerned that electronic touch-screen voting systems could easily provide an election night that would make 2000's look crystal clear, I'm not sure we'll even see an election come November.

If Bush's poll numbers continue to fall, and there's every indication they may, his campaign will pull out all stops, use every insidious tool at their disposal to bolster his standing or risk losing it all. The power of the tools a sitting president enjoys is formidable to say the least. The further along we get with this administration, the less I'm willing to put anything past them.

For instance, take Bush's recent trip to "visit" the troops at Ft. Polk in Louisiana. Old Glory, larger than life, barn-sized above hundreds of America's bravest young men and women, many seated cross legged on the floor. Bush, stepping out onto the stage, swaggering his familiar swagger and approaching the mike to thunderous applause. And then He spoke.

It was just another of many made-for-TV moment in the Bush presidency. This one, though, it freaked me out, in all honesty. I'm an avid watcher of the History Channel, and when I see world leaders staging militaristic propaganda like this, it makes me nervous. There's too much precedent, too many horrors borne of this kind of stuff.

No, this is not to say that Bush is Hitler, or Mussolini, or Stalin, or Saddam, or Kim Jung Il, or any of the other leaders who took, and still take in the Korean dictator's case, great pleasure in projecting an image of themselves at one with the military, donning uniforms now and again to further solidify the idea in the minds of those who watch. I'd never claim such a thing.

Still, he worries me. The president gives little credence to not only his detractors, but anything at all that might cause friction with his world view; he's said as much himself. We shouldn't worry, though, the president knows best after all, and will protect us from harm. To hear him tell it, there's nothing anyone could say or do to convince him he could be wrong.

Not that he's proven himself capable of this kind of protection, however. Nine years passed between the two terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The fact that we haven't seen another devastating attack on US soil since 9/11 has less to do with Bush's bravado, Tom Ridge's duct tape, or John Ashcroft's war on civil liberties than it does the fundamental truth about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

I hope this doesn't shock anyone, but they're not the manifestation of Evil, no matter how many times we're told they are. A group of criminal thugs should be treated as such, not raised to the level of Antichrist, as Gen. Boykin might say. It gives them too much credit, and we've already seen how it "plays on the Arab street." When the world's sole superpower invests this much legitimacy in Osama, he rises to folkloric, messianic, standing and his influence grows by leaps and bounds.

Of course, that's not the way Bush sees it. He too has risen to messianic heights, but by trouncing these Evildoers with a twist of his mouth, Biblical rhetoric, and the awesome power of the US Military. Relegating the perpetrators of the attacks against us to their rightful criminal status would make his actions seem far too grandiose and overblown. So instead we are a nation at war with a shadowy enemy, an enemy we should fear and to whom we should overact, fighting, as we are, this unending war, lasting for generations.

Well, another four years at least. Another four years of color-coded commandeering of the news cycle and doing whatever it takes to validate this "war presidency." After all, what does a war president do when there are no true wars to fight?

It's when I consider, and reconsider, Gen. Tommy Frank's statements to that bastion of investigative journalism, Cigar Aficionado, that I truly shudder to think any further. In between discussing his taste in cigars, he discusses what might happen in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack involving WMD here or abroad.

In such a case, he says, "the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy." He goes on to say we'd see the rise of a military government, and our beloved Constitution come "unraveled" The Constitution. Unraveled. Here or abroad, he says. Here, or abroad. God help us is if it's here. God help us if it's anywhere. Election year politics would be the last thing we'd have to worry about.