I want to share some very frightening news with you. Not more than an hour ago, in a park nearby, I ate a hummus sandwich. It was prepared for me by my boyfriend. I know that most Americans will find this more frightening than any policy memos setting forth a legal framework for torture, which the Bush Administration may have asked its lawyers to prepare. But I thought I should tell you anyway.
What’s worse, my boyfriend made another such sandwich for me on Tuesday. I don’t know about you, but this is sort of thing that scares many people a lot more than the idea that the United States traffics undocumented prisoners seized in Iraq to and from Guantanamo Bay in defiance of the Geneva Convention. My boyfriend did not make such a sandwich for me between Tuesday and today, because we were temporarily out of cucumbers. How can anyone feel safe? Polls show that people find these details much more terrifying than the fact that our President and Vice President lied about what they knew about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to persuade the public to support their war.
Even worse, my boyfriend deliberately chose a brand of pita bread that did not contain high fructose corn syrup. I hope the American public will be able to remain as calm in the face of this news, as they did when confronted with a campaign of lies insinuating that the Saddam Hussein regime was behind the attack on New York and Washington that took place on 11 September 2001. I trust they will be able to distinguish false alarms from real danger.