Uthman: Dems took a dive on health reform

Dems 'lose' again on health care

By Allan Uthman

Issue #138 | The Beast

Man. It's been years that I've forced myself to observe, with muted horror, the degeneration of political discourse in America. Occasionally, I've even had the pleasure of taking part in it. But it seems I'm never quite cynical enough to predict the depths we're willing to plumb as a nation.

I thought I was going to write a piece about how stupid it is that the right argues a public option is unfair because private insurance companies can't compete against it. I mean, it really is an insane position, that we can't have a public insurance option because it would provide better service for less money. And it's equally insane to assert that private insurance companies need to make money more than Americans need access to health care.

But things have spiraled ever downward from there. It's pointless to even attempt a cogent argument on this subject, when the other side of the debate are running around with their hair on fire, their leaders promoting obvious, absurd lies about "death panels" and… I don't know, something about Hitler? Shamelessness does have its advantages, apparently. Certainly, no one has to ask Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich if they have any shame, as was asked old Joe McCarthy, because the answer is obviously no. In a saner country, this "death panel" madness would be the end of Palin's political ambitions forever. But then, a saner country would have tossed her into the ocean a year ago.

Anyway, it's a foregone conclusion that whatever the hell gets through the Senate will be labeled Health Care Reform, or Health Insurance Reform, or just Health Reform as they've been calling it lately. And it's equally clear that it will be pretty much useless, maybe even worse than useless. At best, it might solve the problem of impossible prices the same way Bush solved high drug prices: by making the government pay private businesses top dollar for it.

That's how we compromise with industry now. As much as the Democrats are vilifying the insurance companies (and yes, they are villains in this story), the insurance companies will support the horribly mutilated bill that emerges for Obama to sign. Why? Because they will make more money than ever. Instead of a public option, people who can't afford health insurance will be forced to buy private insurance, the poorest of us subsidized by the government. I suppose, if you have no insurance, that's better than nothing. But it sure as hell isn't much good.

To be fair, there are other good points, supposedly: A ban on rejecting people for preexisting conditions, for instance. But the public option, itself a paltry shadow of what a single-payer system could do for the country, is pretty much dead. It probably won't survive the Senate process, even in a hollowed-out, meaningless form. Why? Because it would work. It would provide better service for lower costs. And the insurance people can't have that.

The problem isn't that the Democrats are spineless compromise fetishists, as many seem to think. Any smart negotiator knows that you start from a position your opponent deems unacceptable—in this case, a UK-style single-payer system, which would actually reduce costs dramatically and provide decent care for everyone.

Say Obama had started there. First of all, polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans support a single-payer system, as well as a majority of doctors. When politicians argue it's not politically viable, they're referring to staunch corporate opposition, not voter opposition, regardless of a few hundred aged, bewildered Glenn Beck drones shouting "keep your government hands off my Medicare" (actual quote). Secondly, even if it isn't viable, starting from a single-payer position would ensure that any eventual compromise would be closer to a decent plan than what we're going to wind up with, now that the Obama administration has started negotiating from an initial position of compromise. Instead, they're compromising the compromise.

Why is this? No, it's not that Democrats are wimps. They're dive artists. Obama promised health care reform, but do he and his DLC inner circle actually want to weaken the stranglehold medical profiteers have on the public? Or do they just want to make a good show of losing the struggle?

The case for a single-payer system is rock solid and easy to explain. A single payer bill could be short enough to read in a few minutes—in fact, there is a single-payer bill floating around (doomed by the "too-liberal" names Kucinich-Conyers), and it's a little over 4,000 words long. Instead, we have a bill that's over 1,000 pages long, written in typically inscrutable legalese, so dense and obscurantist that Republicans can assert nearly anything about it, from death panels to forcible sterilization, and say "read the bill!" with full knowledge that nobody will, nor could they understand it if they did.

Perhaps this explains Obama's complete failure to actually describe the plan, aside from painfully vague references to "reform". It's suspicious that a group of people with the kind of supernatural message discipline they exhibited during the presidential campaign can't muster any kind of reasonable explanation of what the plan is. Why is opposition to the health care bill rising? Not because conservatives don't want it; they never did. It's because liberals are starting to smell the bullshit, and recognize that what they're trying to foist on us is not reform, but a massive boondoggle, just another way to funnel cash to donors. And make no mistake, all of the interested parties in this disgusting extortion racket we call a health care system have thrown mountains of cash at all of the important Democrats involved. Why, after all have pharmaceutical companies committed to spend hundreds of millions promoting the bill in a disturbing backroom deal with the White House, if it isn't a simple boondoggle? Why has the AMA, a longstanding opponent of any form of socialized medicine, come out in favor of it? Because, unfortunately, and despite the constant refrain from the paranoid rednecks, there's nothing socialist about it. And it might be baffling, if you don't understand where the real power is in the Party.

Put it this way: After eight years solid of Republicans proving themselves to be dishonest, corrupt and incompetent, what if the Democrats provided universal health coverage and paid for it by taxing the rich? I'll tell you what: They wouldn't lose another election for decades. It is actually in the party's self-interest to do these things. And yet, they don't. Why? Because there's one thing even more important to politicians than votes, and that's money. Hell, even if Max Baucus loses his next election, his income level will skyrocket, thanks to the profiteers he's protecting now.

Less than a year ago, Republicans were handed their walking papers, and the national consensus was that they were worse than worthless. And yet they are controlling this debate? With transparent lies and spooky stories—about the kind of health care system that the entire first world enjoys, and nobody seems to regret? Bullshit. Even with the help of Frank Luntz, the GOP's talking points suck, and could be effectively rebutted—even by Harry Reid, let alone Obama. Health care rationing? Bureaucrats between you and your doctor? Life-saving procedures denied or delayed? All of these are already rampant in the private system. For every isolated horror story the Right can find in Canada or England, there are hundreds in your own neighborhood. And national health care never leaves individuals destitute or with impossible debt.

The Democrats seem to be throwing this thing on purpose. The public option is DOA and was probably always meant to be. And it's not because they're wussy or incompetent. It's because they're corrupt. It's because all they are is the sock puppet on the left hand of corporate hegemony. Bribery is legal in this country—we call it campaign finance. That's why we can't have a single-payer system, and that's why this bill devolving into yet another massive theft of taxpayer money was a foregone conclusion. In the end, maybe some poor people will be able to get treatment when they couldn't before, but only in the weakest, most costly and corrupt way conceivable. And if that's the only way we can do it, then I guess I'm for it.

Sodomy keeps us safe?

We really ought to broadcast this to the terrorists -- and the unfortunate Arab-Muslims mistaken for terrorists -- of the world, that flashlights and splintery broomsticks await them. Oh, and they'll have to drink our pee, too.

Who ever thought this getting down to their level thing in order to defeat them would be so much kinky fun?

Hey, we're still the USA, we're still the good guys, so if we're pissing down people's throats, it's for all the right reasons.

And if these kinds of tough tactics enrage peaceful Arabs and Muslims enough to drive them into the terrorists' ranks, well... A $500 billion annual Pentagon budget can buy an elongated enhanced interrogation device (aka, a broomstick) for every last Muslim on Earth. Yeah, baby! USA! USA!

Whores on Terror

Never mind the waterboarding, here's the sodomy

By Allan Uthman

July 2009 | The BEAST

URL: http://buffalobeast.com/137/sodomy.html

Uthman: Used teabaggers

One Lump or Two

By Allan Uthman

April/May 2009 | BuffaloBeast.com

I'm actually starting to feel sorry for conservatives. They've never made much sense, but the trouncing they took in November appears to have driven them completely insane.

I can't think of a better word to describe people who meet up to protest taxes when taxes have not been raised, or who actually accuse the president who ended torture of being a fascist.

It seems fairly obvious, but if taxes and deficits were the issue, these same people would have been out in the streets for years now. The real issues, the true motives behind these paltry protests, are fairly simple: They lost, and there's a black guy with a foreign-sounding name in the White House. Does anyone think a bunch of old white people would be out in the street shouting crazy shit about fascism if Hillary Clinton was president? Not a chance. They'd be mad, but not insane.

What evidence is there that Obama's a fascist? So far, it seems that his insistence on the resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner is pretty much it. There is carping that he is asserting "unconstrained control" of the economy, but this is hogwash. He is, of course, totally constrained by congress; they just want to give him what he wants at the moment, much like the Delay congress did for Bush. Primarily, it seems, it is Obama's very charisma that right-wingers see as a sign of fascism. That is, of course, totally ridiculous. A charismatic leader is not a requirement of fascism, only that a leader be in total control and willing to use force to suppress his political opposition, neither condition being met by Obama. But to the Right, the very fact of Obama's popularity is proof enough that he is a black Hitler.

Just look at the signs in those ubiquitous pictures of the ludicrously over-hyped "tea parties" on tax day. "Obama's plan: white slavery." "Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler." And my personal favorite, "The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens."

It would be bad enough if this were the worst of it, but there is much more. We've all heard the crazed, baseless conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate, the flatly idiotic notions of his plans to impose Islamic law, the accusations of "radical Marxism." But the hits just keep on coming. Recently, Alan Keyes, fast becoming the most ridiculous man in America, asserted that Obama would stage terrorist acts as a pretext for declaring martial law and cancelling future elections.

It's hard to gauge just how many people really believe this crazy crap, but it's obviously not enough to hurt Obama's approval ratings, which is just driving the right even crazier. Glenn Beck, for instance, appears to be having a nervous breakdown on live TV, to the entertainment of millions.

Beck, the new model of faux populist outrage, is really something to behold. There's an element of danger to his performances that you just don't see in the typical right wing ideologue. Hannity is Hannity every day—he's not going to have a fit or burst into tears on camera, not ever. Beck, on the other hand, is doing some kind of schizophrenic high wire act, descending further into madness with each broadcast.

If you want to understand real fascism, check out his new website, the912project.com, which "is designed to bring us back to the place we were on September 12th, 2001." Think about that for a second. Glenn Beck and his ilk think America was at its best on the day we were the most frightened, traumatized, and bewildered in recent history. I remember 9/12/01. People who had always seemed reasonable to me were bellowing about leaving glass craters in the desert. It was the most bloodthirsty, irrational, and easily led that this nation has been in my life, and Beck thinks that's exactly where we need to be. This is because Glenn Beck is a real fascist. He wants the American people scared shitless, willing to submit to any violation of their rights, begging for a strongman to protect them from the evil other. Charisma's got nothing to do with it.

Of course, there has always been a crazy left, too. The difference is that they never got the kind of media attention that these teabagging faux populists have. There were truly grassroots demonstrations against the Iraq invasion, involving not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands. But they never received even a hundredth of the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did. In fact, they were ignored as much as possible, to the point of implausibility.

The highest estimate I've seen for tea party turnout, the one cited by Michelle Malkin and other conservative ideologues with an obvious desire to inflate the numbers as much as possible, is 250,000 nationwide, at 800 events. First of all, that makes for an average of 312 people per event. Second, 250,000 people is fewer than showed up at a single anti-war rally in DC before the Iraq invasion, which received nothing like the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did. Guess how many people showed for the DC tea party? 3,000. Three f---ing thousand. That's your big scary tax revolt, after weeks of promotion on cable news.

I want to emphasize this point again. Even former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks non-profit coordinated the tea parties, said on Meet the Press that there were "over 800 tea parties around the country, with attendance in the hundreds." Get that? That's hundreds. The largest congregation of teabaggers of all was in the largest southern capitol, Atlanta, numbering 15,000.

Folks, these numbers aren't modest; they are completely pathetic. 15,000 white people isn't a major people's movement; it's a Rush concert. In other cities, the protests drew fewer people than a good street magician. There is no legitimate justification for the amount of coverage these tiny crowds received.

The hard right—people who call guys like Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity "great Americans"—find themselves suddenly marginalized, powerless, irrelevant. There is a natural radicalization that goes along with this kind of political alienation, and we saw some of this on the left during the Bush years. The difference is that the "loony left" and even the not-so-loony left was almost completely ignored by the press in those years. Even now, the equivalents of these "Obama=Hitler" nutjobs on the left, if there are any, aren't paid any mind. However, this rapidly dwindling, obviously ignorant, increasingly manic fringe on the right is still somehow a major media focus point.

Why? Maybe it's because their ostensible message about taxes is one shared by the extremely wealthy, the ones who actually stand to lose something (about 4% of their income) if Obama's tax plan is implemented. Maybe it's because the press has been swallowed up by giant conglomerates, which also stand to lose. Of course, it's sad that there are always a few pawns willing to work on their behalf, but it's also pretty encouraging just how few of them there are. Despite the best efforts of hugely popular media outlets to confuse the issues and demonize Obama as a fascist socialist America-hater, his approval rating is at 64%. And in an amazing development, the majority of Americans don't even think their taxes are too high.

It seems that people may finally be wising up to the fraudulent economics of the GOP, despite the corporate press' best efforts to fool them. Yes, we have a huge debt problem, but we all know whose fault that is. And the only way we will ever pay down that debt is to raise taxes. That's not fascism; that's reality.

But reality is the last thing on the teabaggers' minds. In fact, reality is the enemy. What they want, what they appear to need, is something, anything, that will enable them to deny their own culpability in causing the truly horrific condition this country was in the day Obama walked into the Oval Office and Bush flew away from a crowd of jeering people--a very, very big crowd.

Uthman: Palin reveals McCain campaign's cynicism

OK, even if you hate this op-ed, you gotta check out the Chappelle show clip referenced herein!  I promise you'll laugh.


Palin-Drones
By Allan Uthman
The Beast

A few months ago, a friend asked me who I though McCain would or should pick to be his vice presidential candidate. "I think if I were working for McCain," I said, "I'd wait until Obama makes his choice, and if he picks a man, pick a woman, or if he picks a woman, pick a man." You know, work the difference. So it was no surprise to me that McCain picked a woman. But, just like everyone else, I was dumbfounded that woman was Sarah Palin, one-year governor of a state over twice the size of Texas with the population of El Paso (there is one person per square mile in Alaska).

It seemed at first that McCain may have thrown the election by choosing an unknown, unready running mate with a BS in communications from Idaho University and a hard-right Christianist ideology, in a ploy to woo disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. "We're not that stupid," came the cry from insulted feminists, and they were right to recognize that Palin did not in any way represent their ambitions.

But it turns out that they are that stupid, or at least some of them are. While it seems unfathomable that women who supported Hillary Clinton could flip to the GOP ticket for a woman who is pro-life, pro-assault rifle and pro-Bush just because she's a woman, McCain's numbers among white women have shot up with Palin's stunt nomination. This is incredibly disappointing.

Palin is so obviously not equipped to be president that her own surrogates are not willing to discuss the possibility that McCain could die or become incapacitated in office. "She's not running for president," is the refrain. But of course, the only relevant issue when considering a VP choice, according to both presidential candidates (at least before Palin was picked), is whether they are ready to become president. John McCain will be 73 by January, used to smoke, loves to eat barbecued meat, and has had multiple bouts with serious cancer. If any president was ever likely to die in office, it's McCain. The guy could go any minute, really.  And yet his campaign thinks it's okay to select a nominee based entirely on demographic appeal, after a single interview.  And then they withhold her from the press, an obvious sign that they know she is not knowledgeable enough to survive under the spotlight. She gives one speech—a single goddamn speech—over and over again, repeating the same, already debunked, self-flattering lies about her fabricated image as a reform-minded maverick, and the press stands up and cheers, just for the novelty of her. This is a step backwards for gender equality, because if Palin were a man, the press would have murdered him by now. Special dispensation is not equality.

What this selection says about John McCain is simple: He doesn't give a damn what happens to this country when he's dead. McCain's personal favorite choices, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, are much closer to him in terms of politics and experience. These are guys who McCain would have selected if he were a real maverick, bucking party orthodoxy for the good of the country. McCain would probably have won anyway, impressing independents by risking GOP mutiny to stay true to himself, although he would never have closed the fundraising gap. Of course, there's a good chance that all McCain ever had to do to win this thing was talk about Vietnam and stay white.

One of the most infuriating things to see on TV news—the only news that matters, when it comes to shaping public opinion—is when they do one of those "fact-check" segments while omitting relevant facts. A good example is the squashing of Palin's attempted book-banning episode when she was mayor of Wasilla, a town of 7,000 which Palin left $20 million in debt.

This is from The New York Times:

"[I]n 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book 'Daddy's Roommate' on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to [future Palin campaign director Laura] Chase and [former Wasilla mayor John] Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

" 'Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff,' Ms. Chase said. ''It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.'

As mayor, Palin asked the town's library director, Mary Ellen Emmons, three times, how she'd feel about book-banning, the last time asking if she'd change her mind if people were picketing the library. Emmons was staunchly opposed. Palin fired Emmons for "not fully supporting her efforts to govern," only rehiring her when there was an outpouring of public protest against the move.

To me, this is a really big deal. But the story has been "debunked" repeatedly in the press, relying on a factcheck.org report dismissing a hoax e-mail that provided a bogus list of books "banned" by Palin. So the story is "Palin never banned any books," which is true, but she sure as hell would have if she could have. The abortive firing episode gets nary a mention, giving the impression that the very idea Palin wanted to ban books is false, when it clearly is not.

And, since Obama's church is such a hot topic, it would seem strange that Palin's church, which preaches end-times theology and glossolalia, has received little mainstream scrutiny. You want crazy pastor quotes? Check out Palin's pastor, Ed Kalnins:

On John Kerry: "I'm not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I'm sorry."

On Bush: "I hate criticisms towards the president, because it's like criticisms towards the pastor – it's almost like, it's not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That's what it'll get you."

On Iraq: "What you see in Iraq, basically, is a manifestation of what's going on in this unseen world called the spirit world. ... We need to think like Jesus thinks. We are in a time and a season of war, and we need to think like that. ... Jesus called us to die. You're worried about getting hurt? He's called us to die. ... I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say 'war mode.' "

Yeah. That's where Palin learned about morality. And she was in attendance at the church just weeks ago, as a guest speaker from Jews for Jesus described Palestinian terrorism as a manifestation of God's "judgment of unbelief" against Jews for rejecting Christ. It's not surprising that evangelical Christians are fired up by Palin, but again, I can't fathom the idea that Hillary Clinton supporters are excited about her.

And then there's this little tidbit, from her RNC speech:

"A writer observed, 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.' And I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman."

That unnamed "writer" was unnamed for a reason. It was Westbrook Pegler, an openly racist columnist who wrote of wishing for the assassinations of FDR—and Robert Kennedy. Pegler's xenophobic, red-baiting politics were so extreme (he described Jews as "instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared") that he was booted from the John Birch Society. In 1963, Pegler wrote that it was "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry." And, by the way, Pegler described Truman as a "hater," and Truman called Pegler a "guttersnipe." High praise, indeed.

It's hard to imagine why Palin or her speechwriter would include a phoned in quotation about how much better small-town people are than the rest of us from such a toxic source, when so many similar folksy platitudes could be pilfered from more benign writers, even ones whose names could be mentioned in public. I can only conclude that this was a coded message to the fascist right, the worst element in American politics, the very people we were all hoping were waning in significance this election cycle, that it was game on once again. I suppose there are plenty of white women who are anti-labor, pro-life, evangelical Christians. It's just that I can't imagine any of them were planning to vote for Obama, or Clinton, before the Palin selection.

Before anyone starts claiming that black Obama voters are equally shallow, consider whether they'd have voted for Alan Keyes. Because that's the nearest analogy I can think of for Palin's politics. Black people wouldn't vote for Alan Keyes, even if he were running against Robert Byrd. They're just not that stupid. So what the hell is wrong with white women? Are they really so aggrieved that Hillary got edged out of the Democratic nomination by Obama that they're willing to ruin the country just for spite?

The tragedy here is that, for all McCain's groundwork in building an image of himself as a man of character, the McCain/Palin campaign is the most cynical in modern American history. No longer feeling the need to even find a fact to hang their hat on, they have broken through the limits of distortion into the realm of utter fabrication, revealing their total contempt for the voting public. They don't twist the truth; the truth's got nothing to do with their strategy. It's much easier to just lie. And it's working. For their lies about their opponents and about themselves, they have been rewarded by substantial gains in key demographics, especially white women. Palin's selection has also enabled them to deflect criticism by crying sexism whenever Palin's obvious deficiencies as a candidate are raised.

And about that: It was the Clinton campaign that opened the door on claiming gender victimization as an electoral tactic. As her chances in the Democratic primary waned, Clinton and her surrogates went hog wild on the sexism charges, lashing out at anyone who dared criticize her. Admittedly, there were some ignorant comments here and there, albeit never from the Obama campaign. But when things got hairy, the Clinton campaign and its supporters leaned on sexism as an all-purpose excuse for losing, and it was a big steaming pile of horseshit.  The fact is that Clinton's gender was pretty much the only thing that distinguished her from a field rife with old, white, compromised senators. If Hillary Clinton were a man, there would have been no telling her apart from Dodd, Biden, or John Kerry for that matter. But Obama, even if you made him white, would still have been young, eloquent, and charismatic. In other words, as weird as this sounds, if you made Clinton and Obama into white men, Obama would have kicked her ass—it wouldn't have been close.

But Hillary's dead-enders insist that their expected primary victories were robbed from them by the "rampant misogyny" of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and somehow Obama himself. And as Hillary's defeat drew ever closer, she herself ratcheted up the faux feminist rhetoric, leaving Obama with hordes of angry, inconsolable women blaming him for their imagined oppression, and somehow admiring Sean Hannity at the same time. And now, the Republicans have picked up the tactic and run with it, accusing Obama of calling Palin "a pig" (willful ignorance of cliché metaphors is a symptom of this condition) and labeling anyone who dares scrutinize Palin a sexist, including Tina Fey. These allegations hold about as much water as calling condemnations of Michael Vick racist.

There's a great sketch from the Dave Chapelle show, wherein Chappelle and crew are dressed up as classic movie monsters. Charlie Murphy is Frankenstein's monster, and when he gets fired from his office job, he accuses his boss of racism. A black coworker looks at him and exclaims, "nigga, you a Frankenstein!"

Nobody is after Sarah Palin because she's a woman. The fact is, she's a Frankenstein. And if women are so angry about losing a primary fight that they're willing to elect a Frankenstein, even a female Frankenstein, then they really are gullible, emotional, weak-minded fools, and they really do deserve all the derision they've gotten and more.

PERFECT Op-Ed on Overhyped U.S. Terror Threat

This dead-on commentary needs no further comment. It is perfect. It is everything I've been saying (or trying unsuccessfully to say) for years now. Enough said already -- just READ IT!

The Avalanche Threat
No one is safe
Allan Uthman

"Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a Muslim muezzin. Millions of Europeans already do. And liberals will still tell you that 'diversity is our strength' – while Talibanic enforcers cruise our cities burning books and barber shops... the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the 'separation of church and state' ... and the Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy."

- Promotional text for Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.

9/11 really changed everything. Before, the news covered some events of genuine importance. Now, Americans are subjected to a constant deluge of "holy crap"-style terrorism coverage. Our heightened anxiety over 9/11 has been cultivated and stretched out over the past six years, to the point now that any event which even superficially resembles a terrorist attack, no matter how briefly, gets week-long national coverage. A steam pipe blows in New York? It's "especially frightening, considering what happened on 9/11." Some rich douchebag crashes his helicopter into an apartment building? "A chilling reminder of the events that took place on 9/11." We're so pathetically traumatized that an entire city can now be brought to its knees by an ad for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It hardly speaks of America as the proud, tough nation it imagines itself to be.

Of course, we're all a little tense, having been waiting, vigilant, muscles clenched, for the next inevitable strike. Any day, now, any minute, and... BLAMMO! It could happen to you, we're told repeatedly. It could happen anywhere. But really, how serious is the threat of domestic terrorism?

More Americans have been killed in the war in Iraq than have ever been killed by terrorism in the history of the country. A San Francisco Chronicle piece puts the odds of being killed by terrorism as slightly lower than dying in an avalanche. How much are we spending on avalanche prevention? Why is there no counter-avalanche czar? How many news stories have you seen about the threat of avalanches? Think about it: "Avalanches: Are we safer than we were?" Or "Democrats: Soft on avalanches?" Why does the liberal media ignore the avalanche threat?

You get the idea. From a purely rational perspective, we are spending a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time, money and attention on what amounts to a tiny threat. Not only that, but we have failed miserably in even reducing that threat, despite the astounding scope of our backwards approach to it.

It's truly amazing: we spend more on defense and security than the entire rest of the world, and the enemy is a shabby assemblage of repressed losers. Yet somehow the media manages to effectively convey the feeling that the country is some soft, white, utterly vulnerable blob of flesh, a giant, defenseless belly with no arms or legs, practically begging to be punctured and devoured by a teeming mass of impossibly disciplined super-criminals.

In fact, looking at the attacks that have occurred and the plans that have been discovered, there's been a marked downward trend in terrorist competence since 9/11. The last few have almost been comical: Four guys concoct a plan to attack an army base dressed as pizza guys (and hadn't even gotten any weapons by the time they were busted), another handful entertain physically impossible fantasies of blowing up an airport by lighting a pipeline miles away, and two doctors in England set themselves on fire and crash their car into a wall. We're not dealing with Bond villains here.

The truth, when it comes to what motivates suicide bombers, is a lot easier to understand than you think: sexual frustration. In the harsher varieties of Sunni Islam, polygamy and strictly observed rules against extramarital sex combine to produce grown men who have never touched a girl (and possibly never even beaten off, thanks to rules against masturbation). They are total losers in the game of life. This is, for any multicellular organism, an intolerable condition, and frankly inhumane. Let's not forget that the mainly adolescent American males who shoot up their schools usually aren't big winners with the ladies either. Add to this smoldering frustration the promise of an eternal super-orgy upon death, and anyone dumb enough to believe their local radical mullah would be itching for a shortcut to paradise.

Obviously, there's some serious resentment of the West involved, but again, these guys have never been laid. If I go more than a week without some kind of orgasm, I'm fantasizing about killing people who drive a little slower than I do, and none of them bombed my village. Scoff if you like, but to me this explanation makes a lot more sense than "they hate us for our freedom." Envy us, maybe. Of course, addressing this aspect of the terrorist problem would require that we acknowledge some universal truths about human biology that American society isn't adult enough to face, so we're going with the "mindless alien zombie" theory of terrorism. Sensationalism beats reason once again.

But if what we're led to believe is true, that many millions of people are dedicated to causing mayhem, loosely networked in a clever array of independent cells with access to massive funding and bomb-making expertise and equipment, and many of them are in America as we speak, salivating at the thought of our destruction, then what the hell are they waiting for? The unpopular fact is that no matter how much money you spend or panic you foment, there is just no way to protect against this scenario. With the advance of affordable weapons technology, the ability of any motivated individual to kill others has irrevocably grown. A few centuries ago, all one murderous psychopath could do was whip out a sword and start hacking people—dramatic, but not very effective. How many people could you kill before a crowd took you down? Two or three maybe? Nowadays, any skinny loser can buy a gun or build a bomb and wipe out a whole crowd before they can get out of their chairs. This is a hard truth to swallow, but you really can't prevent terrorism through government ass-kicking, no matter how lavishly funded. You just can't watch everyone all the time. If there are even twenty people right now in America plotting different attacks, at least a couple will be successful.

There are two choices in the face of such threats: Address the terrorists' stated grievances—in other words, leave the Middle East alone, a highly unlikely scenario—or resign yourself to the occasional massacre. Obviously, you don't give up trying to catch people, but let's not pretend Bush has made it impossible to blow things up in America. If nothing has blown up, it only stands to reason that there aren't many people trying. In fact, the FBI said in 2005 that there were "no signs" of terror cells in the US. Didn't hear much about that on the news.

There are many more serious threats than terrorism. From 2001 to 2005, less than three thousand Americans died as a result of terrorism, virtually all of them in one day. In the same span of time, 102,000 died from drunk driving. 108,000 died from lack of health care, while another 264,000 died from medical errors. Nearly half a million died from diabetes. 2.3 million died from cancer. Over 3 million more from heart disease. Guns kill 32,000 a year. Cigarettes kill as many Americans as 9/11 did every week.

These are just a few examples. If I listed every cause of death that presents a bigger threat to the average American than terrorism, there'd be no room for me to write anything else. Seriously: car crashes, wet floors, food poisoning, binge drinking, fireworks, et cetera. So why aren't we spending those untold billions on better health care, or food safety standards, or gun control?

Of course, most would say we have no choice, that if we let up for a second in spending obscene sums "fighting terror" at home and abroad, the terrorists would... what? Really, what would they do? Let's look at what most would call a worst-case security scenario: We surrender. The US pulls all of its troops out of all military engagements around the world, stops funding Israel, shuts down the DHS and reverses all security measures taken since 9/11. What would really happen? Would an Islamofascist horde really emerge from the ocean and occupy the nation? Of course not. We're talking about a few thousand bearded dicks on the other side of the world. What might happen is that every once in a great while, someone blows up a Pizza Hut. That would suck, but if we were spending all that money addressing problems that actually kill large numbers of people, we could more than make up the difference. Not to mention that if we really did these politically impossible things, Islamic terrorists would no longer have a reason to attack us.

The British, who have some experience with weathering the occasional bombing, are showing signs of stepping back from the threat-hyping practices which have become quasi-religious rituals in America. In April, they announced they were shelving the exquisitely Orwellian phrase "war on terror," in part because it strengthens terrorists. As International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said, "We do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives. It is the vast majority of the people in the world—of all nationalities and faiths—against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger." That is, by overestimating the threat of terrorism, we make terrorists feel more powerful than they are, and make joining their ranks more alluring for disgruntled Muslims. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pretend they're powerful, and eventually they will be.

There is one truly dangerous possibility I'm leaving out, of course—the mushroom cloud. But the idea of al Qaeda as a tech-savvy, sophisticated operation is overblown. Their most clever attack to date involved flight school and box cutters. It was a stunning success, but a far cry from acquiring, smuggling and detonating a nuke. As far as dirty bombs go, they don't actually work—look it up—and judging by the "sophistication" of the enemy, they'd probably die of radiation poisoning before they finished making one. "Cyberterrorism" is purely an invention of the media, on a par with Y2K as a legitimate threat.

Still, the one significant way in which terrorism could really threaten this county would be a nuke. So how do we deal with that threat—the only threat that warrants serious national anxiety? Well, one way would be to spend a lot on nonproliferation programs—from coordinated efforts with other countries to secure vulnerable nukes and fissile materials, to simply buying black market nuclear technology outright. But the Bush administration has refused to sign an international nuclear nonproliferation treaty and is cutting back funding on these programs, which were already only in the millions, not billions, over strong objections of people in the field. Obviously, they don't think the threat is very serious, and they'd rather spend the cash on invading countries which don't contain any terrorists, as well as continuing to keep you freaked the hell out. The actual terrorists who committed the crimes of 9/11 remain ensconced in Pakistan, don't forget. Apparently, they're such powerful geniuses that we just can't catch them, no matter how many Iraqis we kill.

The reality is that, by inflaming our fears and exaggerating the threat, the government and the media are exacerbating the real damage of terrorism: the terror itself. Few of us have died, but boy are we scared. That fear is exactly the effect intended by the terrorists, and it's also pretty useful to a president who flouts constitutional law.

But the fear is completely out of proportion with the threat. We're doing Osama's job for him. So we subject ourselves to more and more outrageous security measures, surrendering our rights, our reputation and our dignity for precious little real gain, and putting other policy issues, which are in reality more important, on the back burner "until the threat is defeated" —in other words, forever. We're like a promiscuous junkie who shuns condoms and clean needles, but spends all his time engaged in elaborate plans to avoid being hit at random by a falling piano. It's just plain dumb.

The press could do the nation a real service if they confronted the simple mathematical folly of our terror obsession. But rational analysis doesn't get good ratings; sensationalism does. You'll watch CNN more if they manage to scare the shit out of you. It's what the White House wants, anyway—a win/win. So if Barack Obama or Mitt Romney stepped on stage today and said, "We would do a lot more good for the country if we shut down the Homeland Security Department and used the money to fund quality universal healthcare," they'd be angrily shouted out of the mainstream, if not killed by a mob. At this point, after years of shock propaganda, telling the truth about the paltry terror threat is just not an option.