“Come on! I wanna ride it! Can I ride it? PLEASE?! Huh? Can I? HUH? PLEASE? HUH? HUH? HUH?”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the President of the United States.

Bush was in Pennsylvania yesterday, campaigning for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann. While in the Keystone State, he stopped at a Harley-Davidson plant, where some enterprising and quick-thinking photographer was lucky enough to snap this completely spontaneous and utterly unplanned candid shot of the Codpiece-in-Chief in yet another display of his red-blooded American manly virility.

I guess this sort of thing must still play well with the President’s base, but being an effete Northeast elitist liberal, I just don’t see it.

There has been a story flitting around the web for a few days now about a group of men, all of middle-eastern descent, arrested in Michigan recently for purchasing large numbers of cellphones. Originally posted on the websites of several local Michigan newspapers, the story was picked up by a number of right-wing blogs, and has how surfaced in the mainstream press.

The facts of the case are that the three men drove to Michigan from Texas to purchase the phones. Police were alerted when the men attempted to buy big batches of phones from the local Wal-Mart, which has a three-per-purchase limit. The police, finding 1000 phones in the mens’ van, then arrested the men on charges of terrorism, citing a possible plot to blow up the bridge to Mackinac Island.

This whole story is just all kinds of stupid.

The idea that terrorists in Texas would travel to Michigan to blow up a bridge to Mackinac Island is patently ridiculous. If you are not familiar (which wouldn’t be surprising), Mackinac is a small island at the far northern tip of Lake Huron, right where the lower part of Michigan meets the Upper Peninsula. It is packed solid with overpriced hotels and shops, and serves as a tourist destination for denizens of the upper Midwest who would like to consider themselves well-heeled.

Ever since it dawned on the collective consciousness that the planes weren’t hitting the buildings by mistake, people across the country have been vastly overestimating the risk of terrorists attacking. In some cases, this failure to deal with the threat rationally is understandable—maybe the odds are low, the argument goes, but wouldn’t we rather be safe than sorry? At the opposite extreme are examples such as Indiana’s list of potential terror targets, which includes such high-value sites as a petting zoo and a popcorn factory. One can only assume that the motivation here is the treasure-trove of homeland security funding pouring out of federal coffers.

Either way, there is, in reality, just about zero chance that terrorists are going to attack anything in a small Midwest town that is not a large chemical plant or a nuclear power plant. Regardless of how important the local tourist destination might seem to area residents, none of this stuff is high-profile in the national sense that would qualify it as a likely terrorist target.

Which brings us back to the three guys arrested in Michigan.

Their explanation? They say they were buying the phones for resale, which seems like a pretty likely scenario to me. What makes it seem even more likely is the fact that local authorities have yet to provide any further explanation for the mens’ arrest other than that they “looked suspicious” (i.e., they’re Middle Eastern).

Perhaps it will turn out that these guys really were up to something nefarious, and that disaster at Mackinac Island has been narrowly averted by the vigilance of local authorities, but I doubt it. As with the columnist who raised all the ruckus a few years ago about the swarthy men on her flight engaging in highly suspicious activities such as going to the bathroom and talking to one another, this story looks to be a prime example of hysteria and racism.

The American public can be assured that the United States government will continue to do everything in its power, under the leadership of President Bush and in cooperation with our British and other allies, to defend our nations and our world.

That would be Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at this morning’s press briefing about the plot uncovered by British intelligence and law enforcement agencies to detonate explosives on flights bound for the U.S.

As if Chertoff dropping the phrase “deadly plot” every ten seconds weren’t enough, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, when he wasn’t saying how little he could tell us about said plot due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation, had this to add:

As we have stated many times before, we are a nation at war. Today’s actions are a stark reminder that the threat is real and that we have a deadly enemy who still wakes every morning thinking of new ways to kill innocent men, women and children, and dreams every night about wrecking the destruction on freedom-loving countries.

So few actual details about this plot have been released that it is hard to say how this particular story compares to that of Jose Padilla, Robert Reid, the Lackawanna cell, the guy who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, the vague plot recently uncovered in Florida, or any of the other deadly and imminent terrorist schemes that seem to be uncovered by the authorities any time the public’s attention starts to stray from the constant threat of terrorism and begins to focus on the blatant incompetence and corruption of the Republicans running the country.

That being said, let me make sure I’ve got this straight. The British, using traditional law enforcement and intelligence methods, manage to uncover and prevent a major terrorist attack, and not for the first time, either. However, the way to really root out this sort of thing remains the tried-and-true Bush method: spending hundreds of billions of dollars to kill people in countries not related to actual terrorist groups, declaring that the President isn’t constrained by laws, and instituting poorly thought-out and hastily implemented airport security hassles.

I, for one, know I will rest easier knowing that I can trust in the leadership of President Bush to protect me from the evil brown freedom-haters. I also look forward to never again being able to take a bottle of water on a plane, because… uhh… we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here… and… uh…..

Wait a minute…

If we were talking about anyone else besides Joe Lieberman, I might wonder if he realized the second he uttered that word during the 2004 presidential primaries that he was providing immediate comedic fodder for anyone and everyone commenting on his quixotic enterprise.

Since it is Lieberman we’re talking about, though, I have to assume that to this day, he is still convinced that his mighty train has only been robbed of its Joementum by the dastardly left-wing radicals who have conspired to steal the Connecticut primary from him and hand it over to radical leftist hippies.

I have avoided saying anything about the Lieberman/Lamont race up to this point for two reasons:

1. It’s the Connecticut Democratic primary, so I have no say in the matter.
2. I can’t stand Joe Lieberman, and have a difficult time coming up with anything rational to say about him.

Lamont’s campaign has been portrayed by the Lieberman campaign, most major media outlets, and an army of right wing commentators as an attempt to enforce ideological purity on the Democratic Party by it far-Left constituents. Lieberman is a centrist, this line of thinking goes, so the Left is trying to boot him out of the party.

However, since the notion of ideological purity among Democrats is laughable at best, this accusation is ridiculous on its face.

The anger at Lieberman among Democrats is not based on his voting record. While a lot of people would have liked for him to vote differently than he did on many issues, the same can be said of any number of his fellow Democrats in the Senate. What generates such animosity towards Joe Lieberman is his sanctimonious attitude and his willingness to serve as a de facto Republican stooge.

With Republicans controlling all three branches of government, the best that Democrats can hope for is to constitute an effective opposition party, fending off the most egregious of the Right’s attempts to re-shape the government and the country. Having someone like Lieberman in the party makes this already difficult task even harder. With his frequent and friendly visits to right-wing media outlets and his willingness to accuse Democrats of lacking patriotism, Lieberman has consistently opened a gaping hole in his party’s defenses through which the Right can attack.

Lieberman did not lose the primary because he is a centrist. He lost because he has been a willing and eager participant in the Right’s attempts to demolish anyone and anything that gets in they way of their quest for power.

There has not been much time for reading so far this summer, so I am only just now getting toward the end of the Pol Pot biography (Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short) that I picked up back in the spring.

It is quite good, as books about insane totalitarian utopia schemes go. With a subject like the Khmer Rouge, it is easy to throw up one’s hands and declare that these people are all just crazy. How else to explain the forced emptying of the cities, the enforcement of communal food preparation, the breaking up of families, and the systematic crushing of individuality?

Short, a British journalist, goes a long way towards providing answers to that question. While he clearly does not sympathize with what Pol and the Khmer Rouges were trying to do and explicitly condemns their actions and motivations, he does a good job of illustrating how and why things went so badly for Cambodia. Like many ideoloically driven revolutions, the people who began it may have had good intentions, but with their focus solely on the ideology rather than its practical effects, the situation went south quickly.

Where Short’s narrative falters, I think, is in his repeated assertions that the tragedy in Cambodia was rooted in Khmer psychology. Perhaps Khmers are, as Short asserts, inherently prone to black-and-white thinking and brutality. However, he provides little evidence to back up this claim, and makes it far too often.

That flaw aside, the book is definitely worth reading.

I was visiting the website for the Nokia Theater in Times Square to see if tickets for the Black Angels/Black Keys show had gone on sale yet. Sadly, they have not.

However, while scrolling through the list of upcoming shows, I did notice that there will not be just one, but two (count ‘em, TWO) night with “All Four Original Members of Asia” (queue the opening strains of “Heat of the Moment”)!

There are several aspects of this announcement that I find surprising:

1. That all for original members of Asia are touring,
2. That there is enough interest in such a tour to merit two nights, and
3. That they expect to be able to get forty bucks per ticket.

Seriously, Asia?