Sick of playing the home version of ABC’s “Wife Swap”, parents of the Little Jets soccer team decided to spend our Thursday evening post-game gathering following more childish pursuits. After we’d exhausted the ecstasy and all our finger-paints, our neighbor led a session of “One of These Things is Not Like the Others… One of These Things Just Doesn’t Belong.” We quickly segregated squares among circles and culled vegetables from fruits but universally failed properly to identify the outlier among Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, and Courtney Love. With twins in the mix we were flummoxed to learn that the anomaly is not the Cobain widow, but rather the wholesome Ashley. The other two, apparently, are coke-sniffing skanks who rack up frequent flyer miles at rehab clinics.

While images of the cherubic “Full House” star spreading in some alley for a bag of Bolivian marching powder no doubt fracture our collective psyche, the polity remains downright stupefied that John Kerry garnered no bounce in the polls after what even critics acknowledge was a masterful performance in Boston. Journalists and political hacks alike are trying to explain the results and have offered several lame excuses: The paucity of swing voters coupled with the velvet glove offered by the Democrats did little to damage Bush’s standing. Kerry’s lack of specificity on Iraqi egress failed the foreign policy threshold. His daughter’s hamster anecdote resurrected the ghost of Richard Gere’s gerbilectomy and fanned the flames of the gay marriage controversy.

The real reason, of course, is Karl Rove and his puppets of terror. Although Pakistani security forces arrested Al Qaeda senior operative Ahmed Ghailani on July 25th, his capture was formally announced four days later in an effort to marginalize Kerry’s acceptance speech. The Pakistan Foreign Office the Bush Administration strongly deny the charges but have offered no explanation why evidence collected two weeks earlier during the apprehension of Mohammad Khan was withheld until August.

Tom Ridge worried that, “The quality of this intelligence… is rarely seen and is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information.” The cache contained photos, sketches and written documents detailing structural formations, reconnaissance points, and hospital locations. Ridge added that “it was essential” that plots targeting the New York Stock Exchange, Washington’s IMF and World Bank buildings and other financial institutions be immediately publicized. He swiftly raised the terror alert level to Code Orange for these particular locations. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelley cited “clearly personal surveillance” as a rational to deploy heavily armed security and to erect barricades around Manhattan.

When it turned out that the evidence was stale, World Bank spokesman Dana Milverton quipped that it was “largely out of date” having been compiled in 2001 and that “a lot of it was actually public information that anyone from outside the building could have gotten.” “Our job is to identify the threat,” responded Ridge, “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.” With the Republican Convention looming, Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn’t plan to stand down, declaring, “We are deploying our full array of counterterrorism resources. We will take no chances and spare no expense.” And he’s not kidding as Gotham’s escort agencies are importing extra personnel from around the world. “We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming for the week,” boasted one madam. “It’s going to be big,” agreed a pimp from Queens. Another operator added, “We’ve got everything organized – the hotels, the flights, the advertisements. We’ll probably have 60 girls that week instead of the usual 30.” Aunt Millie in Des Moines might be shocked to learn that the standard bearers of family values and Christian ethics pay for a little poon on the side. But with conservative icons like Rush Limbaugh (dope addict), Ralph Reed (gambling lobbyist) and your parish priest (child molester), should anyone really be surprised?