That said, lately I can't help feeling jerked around by all this nonstop terrorism whoop-de-do.

I suppose I reached my limit last week when federal officials increased the color-coded terror status to "orange" and told us all to buy duct tape.

The idea, as I understand it, is to use the duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal our houses from any hazardous materials terrorists might send our way.

Sure. A little duct tape, a little plastic sheeting and we will thwart any insidious terrorist plot.

It reminded me of when we were kids during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Our teachers advised us that in the event of an atomic bomb landing nearby, we should get under our desks, put our heads between our legs and (this they didn't actually say out loud) kiss our sweet butts goodbye.

It may sound like blasphemy when you consider the horrendous events of Sept. 11, 2001, but is it just a wee bit possible that we're over-reacting to this whole terrorism thing?

Thinking about it, the only al-Qaida or other foreign terrorism since that awful day was when some nutcase tried to blow up an airplane with explosives in his shoes.

The anthrax business shortly after 9/11 may have been perpetrated by one or more of our domestic loonies.

And yet we lurch from one terrorist scare to the next.

It's reminiscent of a classic "Twilight Zone" episode from 1960 called "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street."

Residents of an average middle-class street see what they think is a meteor passing overhead. Soon, all the power goes out and someone gets the idea that aliens are out to take over the world, starting with Maple Street.

A few more events involving electrical power going on and off and car engines that mysteriously start when others won't and soon people are accusing each other of being aliens in disguise and start panicking all over the place.

At the end of the program, we see two aliens serenely watching the chaos and agreeing that to conquer the human race, all they have to do is play a few tricks with the utilities and let irrational fear do their work for them.

Watching our daily "terror alerts," I envision Osama bin Laden and his cronies being as smug as those aliens and laughing their evil heads off as we subjugate our good sense and wisdom to fears about terrorism.

Don't get me wrong. 9/11 should have taught us to increase security and be aware that there are bad guys out there. Having a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security is a good idea if it helps get our intelligence agencies on their toes.

But based on the paucity of terrorism in the United States in the past 16 months, I can't help but feel there is more method than madness in the Bush administration scaring the American public.

In other words, we're being jerked around.

Already, we have given the government more and more power to investigate our lives and intrude upon our privacy.

Our economy is crumbling, and all we talk about is terror, with its adjunct of a war with Iraq.

We've gone from record budget surpluses to record budget deficits.

The stock market in which President Bush wanted to invest Social Security money has gone down, down, down.

Yet, we seem perfectly willing to give Bush a pass because the guy is doing a splendid job of fighting terrorism.

Or is he?

We have conquered Afghanistan and liberated its people from the repressive Taliban, but there is no guarantee that democracy will ever exist there.

And bin Laden is still at large, despite billions and billions of our dollars spent on the Afghanistan campaign. By Bush's own admission, only 10 of the 30 most-wanted al-Qaida terrorists have been captured or killed.

Four weeks ago, gas at the Red Apple store in Oneonta was $1.499 a gallon. As I write this, it's $1.719.

Is it lost on anybody that President Bush from 1978 to 1984 was a senior executive at Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company, and from 1986-90 a senior executive of the Harken oil company?

Or that Vice President Dick Cheney was from 1995 to 2000 chief executive of the Halliburton oil company?

Or that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was from 1991 to 2000 a senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her?

We're paying a whopping 22 cents per gallon more than we were a month ago, and yet nobody is complaining much about the government letting the oil companies have their way with us.

Last week, it was revealed that "a key piece of information" leading to the "orange alert" was fabricated. It seems a captured al-Qaida member misled our intelligence services, and all this duct-tape nonsense scared everybody for no reason.

Put another way, our government was jerked around. There seems to be a lot of that going around these days.

Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 441-7208.