In his first inaugural address, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to shake the nation out of its depression over the Great Depression.

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he said, "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."

Now, seven decades later, the nation is fearing fear itself, not over the economy but over the threat of another terrorist strike like the one on Sept. 11, 2001. This time, the president, George W. Bush, seems content to keep us in a state of fear. A frightened public is unlikely to vote out a self-described "war president" in the midst of the "war on terrorism."

The latest attempt by the White House to make sure we stay afraid was the announcement a week ago by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge raising the terror alert to orange (second only to red) for the financial services sectors in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Newark. New York, it turns out, has been on Code Orange alert since the Sept. 11 attacks, so this new directive presumably requires a deeper shade of orange.

As always with these color-coded warnings, Homeland Security doesn't tell us what to do with the information just wanted us to know except to say we should keep on living our lives, going about business as usual.

"We're not going to let threats or this kind of information turn us into fortress America," Ridge said.

Meanwhile, visitors to Washington will find access to the nation's shrines of freedom, from the Capitol to the Supreme Court and the White House, even more restricted than before.

With the warning coming as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and running mate John Edwards set off on a cross-country campaign trip to celebrate their nomination and court votes in the battleground states, some Democrats publicly suggested that Bush & Co. timed the release of the upgraded security threat to draw attention away from the White House wannabes.

Nonsense. Bush wouldn't tamper with the nation's fragile psyche over terrorism any more than he would rush to war in Iraq on the basis of phony intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

In his initial announcement that American forces had seized computer disks detailing al-Qaida's surveillance of government and corporate targets in Washington, New York and New Jersey, Ridge failed to mention that plans were more than three years old, that none of the documents discovered was dated after Sept. 11, 2001.

The Washington Post quoted a senior law-enforcement official who was briefed on the alert as saying, "There's nothing right now that we're hearing that is new. Why did we go to this level?"

When the staleness of the information became known, the administration discovered "a second stream of information" confirming the real and present danger of the threats.

"I think it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that it was based on old information," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, as quoted in the New York Times.

That's the same Scott McClellan who spent months defending the bogus intelligence freely employed by the administration to persuade the public that the very survival of our nation depended on ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his arsenal of weapons.

Ridge reacted angrily to the notion raised by a reporter that election-year politics had something to do with the timing of the intelligence release.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge declared.

Ridge seems to have forgotten his own gratuitous plug for the president in his Sunday warning to the nation:

"I certainly realized that this is sobering news. But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war on terror."

So far at least, the terrorists appear to be winning that war. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has alienated some key former allies by going it virtually alone in Iraq, has stranded tens of thousands of troops indefinitely in Iraq and Afghanistan and has kept the American public on edge with periodic warnings of a pending attack on the U.S. homeland.

Commenting on the federally ordered street closings and vehicle checkpoints, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams correctly observed, "Walling off the Capitol is a capitulation to terrorism."

Brazaitis, formerly a Plain Dealer senior editor, is a Washington columnist.

©2004 cleveland.com

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