US now safer than ever – alledgedly

It seems that the US’s Director of National Intelligence (ha!), John Negroponte, has come forward to refute claims that the threat from terrorism has grown since the invasion of Iraq. Quite the opposite, he says, the threat is now much lower.

Of course, this probably doesn’t include those servicemen who are currently being blown up in Iraq and would otherwise be at barbeques in Arkansas, but I’ll let him off for that.

What I won’t let slide is that, even though everyone’s in so much less danger, the Terror warning status is still sitting on the yellow ‘elevated’ level. Eh? What? If the danger is so much less, surely a threat level of 3 out of 5 is, perhaps, a tad over the top?

Now, obviously, there are two possible ways to look at this. Either Negroponte is a liar-liar-pants -on-fire, and we are all in imminent danger of a horde of heavily armed FALF suicide opticians descending from the hills and annihilating the West with a tide of soothing salinated solution, or….

Possibly, and I don’t wish to upset those Republicans out there who believe their Governement would never do anything wrong, but just possibly the whole ‘Terror alert’ system is a load of pants. A complete stuttering mess of bullshit designed to confuse and frighten those of the American public who are, shall we say, less aware of the world around them than a stunned watermelon. A – not to put too fine a point on it – pile of tosh.

Of course, the endless self-contradiction that has made the Bush administration so popular in the rest of the world (I for one have the complete first season on DVD) has never dulled the appetite of fifty-stone truckers from Texas to use their vote for petty imperialism. So I say we take that vote away. Anyone found to be over the weight of 18 stone should not be granted a vote and should be legally reclassified as a large mammal, or a bear, and then hunted for eight months of the year by anyone carrying a permit. That’d warrant a 3 out of 5 terror rating.