Ridge admits Bush exploited terror alert level

And in other news, the sky is blue, ice is cold, and 2 plus 2 is 4.

In a damning new book, Bush's Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge reveals that Bush wanted to raise the color-coded terror alert level for political purposes on the eve of the 2004 "election."

Even a right-wing partisan like Ridge was so put off that he considered resigning his post. Not like Ridge's misgivings usually stopped him from raising the threat level anyway when the regime thought it could reap political benefits. Ridge raised the terror level just 3 days after the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a move that was plainly political.

The color-coded system bears no relation to reality. It was a political gimmick from the get-go. If you turned on Fox News Channel through much of the decade, the threat level would always be featured in a crawl across the bottom of the screen, as if to scare people into voting GOP - or to rub everyone's faces in the fact that the Republicans were in power.

It would be interesting to see a scientific poll of how many Americans actually trusted the color-coded levels.

(Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/20/ridge-politics-terror)