This is what fear-mongering sounds like: wolf, wolf, wolf, wolf...

Welcome, everyone, to the code orange holiday special. I thought we'd get one when the Wright brothers recreation flopped in the mud a couple weeks ago, but actually it took Tom Keane, a republican, saying that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented, the telegraph story about the super-memo connecting Saddam, Al-Qaeda and Niger shipments was fabricated, and, most gloriously, foreign press breaking the story that the US troops only "captured" Saddam after he had been captured, drugged and left, roofied up, for the US military by the Kurdish troops, making the atavistically named operation Red Dawn a big, fat PR stunt, a case of art imitating other art, like the Jessica Lynch installation and the aircraft carrier piece, or the plastic turkey exhibition. I'd say that Karl Rove was inspired by those SVA extension program ads that are all over the subway, but since to the lot of them New York is, like, Sodomorrah, I doubt that he's visited recently. Meanwhile, under everyone's noses, right around the time of Saddam's "capture," the bulk of Patriot Act II got passed and now the Crayon-masters over at Homeland Security spun the wheel again, and voila, code orange is back.

Happy holidays, everyone.