Here we are again. the second anniversary is always more subdued than the first. But it is still very much on our minds.

The new political blog site, xpat.org, is now up and running. I have my 9/11 editorial up there; Sako’s will be up by tonight.

I am still very unhappy about where Bush has taken us since then. He seems more interested in using 9/11 to justify a conservative agenda he wanted before 9/11; he is less interested in actually protecting the United States. While he spends in excess of $100 billion on the war in Iraq, local security lags and suffers. Bush has not given funding anywhere near sufficient for the U.S. to protect itself, with states and local communities not having enough money to police their borders or support emergency crews in case of another terrorist attack. As Bush hands out multi-hundred-billion-dollar tax cuts to his rich friends, he tells us to use duct tape. Our borders are still unprotected, and Bush can’t even get the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security to work together, which is pitiful.

I also remain extremely uncomfortable with the fact that Bush’s poll numbers continue to follow their mathematical trend downward, broken only by upward surges on 9/11 and the Iraq war. The math, which Bush must himself see, clearly says that Bush will lose the next election–unless there is another war or major terror attack. Now combine the following three facts: (1) Bush has not caught bin Laden nor come close to shutting down al Qaeda; (2) Bush has alienated our allies and started a war in Iraq that has inflamed hatred to the U.S. in the Middle East; and (3) Bush has underfunded our security at home.

Does this not worry anyone else?

Meanwhile, in other areas, Bush is performing miserably. He apparently thought that to bring peace to Israel, all he had to do was to slap together prior peace initiatives, claim it was his idea, and then give it a snappy name, the “Roadmap to Peace.” And the press bought into it; everyone was talking about how it had such a good chance of success. I mean, come on. As if nobody could guess that we would have suicide bombings followed by Israeli attacks on Hamas targets followed by a derailed peace plan. Yeah, that’s never happened before.

Meanwhile, Bush continues to abuse the terrorism scare, slipping the word “terrorist” into the Iraq issue every chance he gets. There is still no proof that there are any terrorists in Iraq, just the presence of guerillas one can expect in any war front. But he is succeeding in getting the press to go along with it, and now, as an amazing seventy percent of Americans think that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, he has succeeded in implanting the idea that the war on terror is justification for the debacle in Iraq.

America is better than that. I really believe it.

UPDATE: Here is another good article, revealing how the “war on terror” has made little, if any, progress. At least the British press isn’t scared spitless to publish something that doesn’t praise the government when it comes to the “terror” mess.