September will be 'National Preparedness Month'

I haven't seen any news stories about it, but this Department of Homeland Security press release, as well as this GSA page, confirms that September is about to be named "National Preparedness Month."

Heck, the Red Cross page flatly states that Tom Ridge will make the official announcement on September 9th.

Whoa.

(Why September 9th, is my first question. That's awfully late, if it's supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year's 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on that date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it'll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.)

The idea, obviously, is to throw a large amount of focus, possibly for weeks on end, on the only issue left on which George Bush outpolls John Kerry. And of course this will come on the heels of the GOP convention. So where the Democrats' post-convention media got blitzed with terror warnings based on years-old intelligence, the Republicans' afterglow might well be favorably extended, implied message being:

"Why, with George Bush and enough first aid kits, we'll all be just fine."

Oh, lookey here: the "America Prepared" campaign has a downloadable .pdf calendar of events.

The very first item is an August 30 "preparedness quiz" in Parade magazine, coinciding with the kickoff of the GOP convention.

(Parade, as most of you know, is a flag-waving Sunday supplement to over 300 US newspapers, with a readership of almost eighty million people. Sunday before last they ran an interview with Dick Cheney, in which he repeats a series of distortions if not outright lies.* Nice. )

Other September Surprises: a whole "educate the family" campaign, with kits available at participating patriotic retailers; an in-school "Ready Deputy" duck-and-cover training program; and a website called Readykids.gov (not yet online, apparently) all launched in the first week of the month.

(A tip of the fedora to Rove here: that's brilliant sheep manipulation. Tie the concept of Bush's only issue to family and children. Unspoken, deniable implication: "vote for Bush if you want your kids to live." Niiiiiice. )

On the 7th, there's another newspaper supplement, then -- yep, the official announcement on the 9th. Look for Tom Ridge, flanked by tremulous collections of frightened waifs, sometime around noon EST.

On 9/11 itself, there's a "NASCAR race in Richmond" listed. That would be the Chevy Rock 'N' Roll 400 at the Richmond International Raceway. Obviously, a NASCAR race has nothing -- nothing -- whatsoever to do with homeland security. It is, however, a GOP-friendly event in Virginia, a battleground state where Bush's lead is within the margin of error.

(Hmm... there are two other NASCAR races in September; one in New Hampshire, the other in Delaware. Both states are solidly in the Kerry camp. And, gosh, nothing like what's going on in Richmond is scheduled. Apparently non-swing state voters just don't need to be quite so "prepared." If we don't see "preparedness" rallies at the other two races -- and they ain't scheduled, folks -- that certainly suggests Bush et al are again using fear as a political tool.)

This is transparently a continuation of the Bush campaign by other means, financed with everyone's tax dollars, out of funds that could be used, say, to hire more actual first-responders, Arabic and Pushtun translators, or troops to replace the exhausted guardsmen.

Bush should be called out on this, now, by journalists, by the Kerry campaign, and by everyone who prefers actual security over campaign propaganda.

*Cheney distortions published by Parade: Cheney bizarrely strawmans all opposition to Bush's military policies as a return to "Cold War" strategies, a non-sequitur irrelevant to either the anti-war position or Kerry's suggestion that an ally or two might be nice; he repeatedly implies the discredited notion that Iraq was allied with Al-Qaeda; and Cheney repeats the falsehood that Iraq kicked out UN weapons inspectors in 1998 (they were withdrawn after a phone call from the U.S. rep to the UN, in advance of a U.S. attack).