Were terror alerts faked to elect Bush?

This is from 5/10/05's USA Today article "Ridge reveals clashes on alerts" (link):
The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

..."More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

...The [threat] level is raised if a majority on the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council favors it and President Bush concurs. Among those on the council with Ridge were Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell...
Here's a timeline supposedly showing correspondences between terror threats and Bush-related news events.

Comments

Yes. Yes, they were. See also Clinton's orders to bomb Afghanistan during Lewinsky's testimony and orders to bomb Iraq while the Congress considered his impeachment. Then again, Clinton was merely responding to weasel-level, down and dirty politics from Ken Starr's fishing expedition, which was, itself, politically motivated, blah, blah, blah. The machine is broken. We are seeing what happens when no one has the courage to truly overhaul it, or (gasp) get another one. Both of the big political parties are too big, too old, and too corrupt to produce anything besides the alarming failures we've seen since the Seventies. Wake up, America. You're dreaming.