Tom Ridge Wants to Keep You Secure:
When the wooden horse was being delivered, all the Trojans were exultant, save one: "Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour;/ Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree,/ All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy." Oh, how Cassandra must have suffered. Imagine: she could see it all, the deaths of everyone, even herself, but because she refused to fuck Apollo, she was damned with the gift of prophecy, of being right but never being heeded. Think about that hell for a moment. Think about seeing the destruction of your city before it happens and then having to live through the actuality of it. Think about telling everyone you love that it is going to happen and then being ignored. All because a simpering god didn't get his rocks off. Eventually, Cassandra got used to it, though. By the end of her life, she merely accepted her fate.

As one of the millions of Cassandras in this America during the Bush administration, the Rude Pundit's initial reaction to the revelation by Tom "Duct and Cover" Ridge that when he was the first Grand Poobah of Homeland Security, the Bush White House wanted him to raise the terrorist threat level as the 2004 election approached was an eye roll. More or less, it was, "Oh, really? Who would've thought that? That's right. Everybody." And as usual when some former Bush official comes clean, he felt the bile poison his throat as he thought, "Thanks, cocksucker, for waiting. Now go back to sucking cock, you scabby-kneed whore."

That's far from hyperbole, because unlike, say, Paul O'Neill and Scott McLellan, who confessed for big advances and their souls, Tom Ridge's book is not really a tell-all. Oh, no, it's merely part of a larger manifesto, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again, a book that presumes to scare the fuck out of us so that corporations and governments and even your college campus can hire firms like, oh, hey, Ridge Global, whose President and CEO is...oh, you fucking know already.

So it wasn't important enough for Tom Ridge to tell Americans that the White House was going to scare them into doubling down on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. No, that didn't matter, like it didn't matter to Colin Powell or any of dozens of craven cunts who polluted the nation. It didn't matter to Tom Ridge that he could have ended the presidency of someone who actually wanted to lie to us that we were on the verge of attack in order to maintain power. That's actual evil, motherfuckers. Ridge didn't resign until February 2005, distant enough from the election so that the Bush administration could fully consolidate its power (until God, tired of waiting for an honorable person to turn on the White House, decided to fuck that up in August of that year).

But a couple of years out, with a consulting firm to run, oh, fuck, yeah, Ridge is gonna make himself seem honorable. No, the threat level wasn't raised in 2004, but Ridge didn't see the effort to raise it as reason enough to try to stop Bush. In other words, Ridge wants you to hire him to plan and provide security even though he was too much of a pathetic wad of fuck to do anything but protest behind the scenes when Karl Rove needed higher poll numbers for Bush.

The motto for his business ought to be: "Tom Ridge: a man who'll negotiate with terrorists."

Poor Cassandra. For her trouble, she got raped by Ajax, made into Agamemnon's concubine, and murdered by Clytemnestra. And if Tom Ridge had been there, all of those things would still have happened.