By way of Alan Greenspan’s thinking, “Threats of deflation, which were a significant concern last year, by all indications are no longer an issue before us.” With a gallon of milk fetching $4 and gas well over $2 at the pump, one can only marvel at his iconoclastic and erudite calculus. It is precisely this kind of thinking that landed the Fed chief a fifth term, though it hasn’t hurt that interest rates have been cut a dozen times since Bush took office. Ever since that bit of fraud down in Florida, however, commodity prices have been surging. Oil has doubled along with a host of industrial metals, including copper and nickel. Wheat and coffee are up by a third while coal and wool are two thirds dearer. Eventually, rising prices means money becomes scarcer; sadly for the President, eventually is now.

Mortgage rates have risen ten percent this year and the real estate market is beginning to roll over. April new home sales plunged 12%, recording the largest monthly decline in a decade. As housing is to the aughts what the NASDAQ was to the 90s, it’s no surprise that consumer sentiment has hit a seven-month low. Mind you, the stock market is not without its own troubles. Though currently in five-digit territory, Mr. Dow has lately spent a couple of nights below 10,000 and odds are – like your friend that spent only a few evenings with a hooker – that he’ll soon again be debased.

Despite the staggering ineptness of John Kerry’s campaign, recent events from POW scandals to financial doldrums have conspired to bestow the lowest approval ratings the administration has ever seen. This seems particularly unfair now that Bush has finally produced evidence of sarin gas and Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq. How can the public blithely ignore these cornerstone elements that took us from Ground Zero to Baghdad?

Perhaps we nostalgically fixate on the events of 9/11, more comfortable as victims rather than perpetrators. The nation is so taken with what took place two and a half years ago that Congress even set up a commission to rehash the events, and burdened it with the impossible task of determining whether the attacks were avoidable or – as Michael Moore infers in “Fahrenheit 911” – sanctioned.

Administration cast offs Richard Clark and Paul O’Neil stated publicly that the President was hell-bent on invading Iraq from his first days in office and that he wantonly downplayed Bin Laden’s threat to the citizenry. Paul Bremer, the head American official in Iraq, eerily predicted in early 2001: “The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?’”

Indeed. As former FBI director Thomas Picard testified, “in late June and through July, [I] met with Attorney General Ashcroft once a week.” According to the commission’s report, Picard “told us that though he initially briefed the attorney general regarding these threats, after two such briefings the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information any more.” Damningly, the Justice Department’s own documents show that a month before the attacks Ashcroft actually cut the FBI’s counterterrorism funding – then proffered a budget slashing counterintelligence spending by an additional $450 million.

Why then did John Ashcroft stop flying commercial aircraft in the summer of 2001? Was there detailed knowledge of what was to transpire? Not according to President Bush, who swore that the government had “no specific threat to act on,” despite an August 6th briefing which warned of “activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings,” and attacks on federal buildings. Good enough for me.