The fellow looked up and said, “Hello Officer. I’m performing a public service. I’m snapping my fingers and scaring away the tigers!” The cop shook his head and replied, “Man, there isn’t a tiger within 10,000 miles of this place unless you count the zoo. The hippy nodded and said, “Effective, isn’t it.”

We are getting used to the Department of Homeland Security taking us to “Orange Alert” for each important national holiday. We crack down on airport security. We round up the usual suspects and tell the public to go about their business but to be very cautious and watchful. The Orange fades to Yellow again as the holiday glow fades and there have been no attacks, no attempted attacks, and no announcement of a terrorism plot thwarted – except perhaps for the man who did not show to board one Paris to DC flight. There were no tigers within 10,000 miles. It was effective wasn’t it?

Our Orange Christmas was important. It raised the campaign against terror to the top of the public consciousness. It reminded the population to be afraid, afraid of the stranger, afraid of nameless terrors lurking in the shadows. Sure, we spent millions; discomfited thousands of travelers from around the world; instituted a new Big Brother technology to record “different” visitors to America but we reinforced the central theme of the Bush Administration’s message for America in 2004 – that enemy combatants, enemies we do not know and cannot recognize lurk in the waiting rooms of every airport in the world and only by reelecting the President can we be assured that the fight against nameless, unrecognizable terror will be carried on.

But a perpetual war on terror requires that there be terror to overcome. The first step toward inducing a democratic people to accept authoritarian intrusions into their daily lives is to make them afraid. Orange Christmas provided a reason to be afraid, an enemy as real as the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war that the President was intent upon waging in Iraq. Just as we were told that specific and credible intelligence proved the existence of terrible weapons in the hands of the Iraqi monster the Bush Administration had uncovered specific and credible intelligence showed we were at the threshold of an impending attack that would dwarf the impact of 9-11.

Throughout the Orange Christmas the President has been active, going from one gathering of his patrons to another, collecting contributions to finance his drive to consolidate his hold on government by promising to protect their profits and provide them with opportunities. That is the other prong of the 2004 campaign – an appeal to acquisitive greed. Combining an appeal those two basic human emotions, greed and fear while painting the opposition as having no purpose other than an unreasoning hatred of George W. Bush, the President has launched his re-election campaign. He has transformed the Republican Party into the Party of Fear; the Party of Greed.