Sometimes I miss the good old days. The good old days when some LED throwies that were part of a viral marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force could paralyze a major American city. Or when an iPod dropped in a toilet would summon a bomb squad. Which is why I’m glad that every so often a book like Tom Ridge’s The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege comes out. Not that I’ll buy the darn thing – or read it – but it’s just so nice to have that tingly sensation of paranoia and distrust of government reinvigorated. I don’t really have the warm fuzzies for the current administration either, but that Bush gang was downright creepy. The height of my anger towards their bald-faced lying and manipulation of public trust was around the time I was contracted by a liberal-leaning commodities trader to do the site AmericanCenturyNow.org because he wanted to sway his moderate Republican business associates right before the 2008 elections. In spite of being a fairly simple, well-documented indictment of the Bush White House that was free of liberal hyperbole, the reaction to the site amongst even my more rabidly Democratic friends was rather ho-hum. Which is where people’s concern about our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the state of the economy, and Guatanamo detainees seems to remain. So keep biting the hands that fed you, Scott McClellan, Tom Ridge, and all you other self-serving bastards. Not only do we expect nothing less of you, we barely notice. Personally, I can’t wait for the Jack Abramoff and Scooter Libby sellouts. They should be pretty juicy. But on a serious note, let us never forget that tragic day of terror when a proud American city was brought to its knees:

And for some reason I can’t resist playing with this graphic: