Election terrors.

• Position: Comment

When Homeland Security head Tom Ridge said in early August that his department "doesn't do politics," it was hard to take him seriously, especially since, when announcing a heightened terror alert two days before, he praised President Bush for his stewardship of the war on terror.

Ridge can't have it both ways.

While it was impossible to know exactly what to make of that terror alert, these guys in the White House "do politics" whenever they breathe.

They've got two bad habits: incompetence and dishonesty. It was difficult to know which one was in play this time.

It could have been incompetence. Ridge simply may not have gotten his story straight the first time he gave us the news. Initially, the Homeland Security folks said they had information that Al Qaeda was doing test runs at the Prudential tower in Newark and that Al Qaeda may be doing ongoing surveillance of the World Bank, the IMF, Citicorp, and the New York Stock Exchange. Then they backtracked, saying that most of the intelligence was three or four years old. Then they turned around and said that some of the information was as current as this January.

Understandably, the American public felt like it was getting yanked around. At the very least, when the Administration has alarming information to pass on, it ought to get all its facts nailed down so that we, as citizens, can act accordingly.

But forgive us for being at least somewhat skeptical.

At one previous alert, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he had serious evidence of a terror threat, and he hadn't even informed Ridge, who said it was nothing new once he found out about it.

Beyond that, here is an Administration that lied to us about the intelligence it was using as a basis for launching the Iraq War.

Here is an Administration that boasted about rolling out the propaganda for that war as if it were a new product to sell.

And here is an Administration that has a no-holds-barred approach to winning elections, as the Florida debacle in 2000 illustrated, to say nothing of Tom DeLay and his gerrymanderers in Texas.

There may be no low that this crowd will not stoop to.

Credibility is a nonrenewable resource. And these guys have used theirs up.

This credibility vacuum comes at a high cost. If the warning is genuine and citizens don't take it seriously, they may make choices that put themselves in needless danger. (The odd aspect about every heightened alert is the Bush Administration's insistence that people keep going about...