By Samuel J. Tilden
Chief Washington Correspondent

Last fall, this correspondent reported that President George W. Bush was doing an outstanding job of relieving the fears, concerns and anxieties of Americans, not to mention those of our friends around the world.

This summer, Dubya and his band of Keystone Kops for Khrist are doing their best to scare Americans out of their wits. Terrorists may strike at any time. Clouds of lethal plutonium could wipe out all life up to 42d Street. Smallpox bombs could reduce the world's greatest power to a helpless congerie of oozing pus.

Of course, July 4th came and went without the Statue of Liberty being blown to bits, which shows that W. is on duty, protecting the homeland. Indeed, it's hard to know why we should be worried. Consider, 

• After mobilizing the entire law enforcement resources of the United States in the wake of the September 11 attack, John the Baptist Ashcroft has managed to arrest exactly zero members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network in the United States.


• The thousands of suspiciously swarthy men of Middle Eastern origin rounded up on flimsy or no charges by John has led to – nothing whatsover.


• Hundreds of unfortunates rounded up in Afghanistan and immured at Guantanamo Bay have provided us with no useful information (or, if they have provided intelligence, it has been left behind on a CIA fax machine, as nothing has come of these thousands of supposedly masterful interrogations.)


• The deployment of thousands of U.S. forces to Afghanistan, there to track down and capture or kill Osama bin Laden, has led to the hope that maybe Osama died (of boredom, probably), leading our Commander in Chief to argue, unexceptionably, "If he's dead, we got 'em." Note to George: and if he isn't and is smuggling a bomb into the U.S. in a shipping container, how would you know?


• The incarceration of American citizens without arrest, charge, or right to habeas corpus has successfully disrupted if not destroyed John Ashcroft's key adversary: the Bill of Rights, repealed except for the Second Amendment.

Despite this, um, mixed record of accomplishment, no one can say that the Bush Administration has failed to respond. Let's look at the Administration's multi-pronged campaign against the al-Qaeda terror network:

• Bush is planning a 250,000-troop invasion of Iraq, which up to now has not been implicated in any al-Qaeda terrorism.


• Bush has shuffled the bureaucratic boxes by lumping the Coast Guard in with the Animal and Plant Inspection Service, thereby coordinating the nation's defense against terror attacks accomplished by smuggling poisonous snakes onto our shores in rafts. (Of course, he's been much too busy to fix the key anti-terror agencies – the FBI and the CIA – that have fallen and can't get up.)


• Bush has shovelled buckets of money into worthless anti-missile defenses now that we have seen we are invulnerable to any other form of attack, and


• Well, that's pretty much it.

Given the carefully calculated and magnificently organized counterattack on terrorism, we clearly have nothing to worry about. Why then are the Bushies trying to get America to fill its pantalones? You don't think they are trying to distract us from something?

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