Tom Ridge: Cassandra With a Penis

What to make of Tom Ridge's bizarre press conference yesterday? Somewhere, he told us, sometime, and by some means, something terrible is going to happen. And Osama bin-Laden will be involved. But the terror alert level is not going to be raised from chartreuse to magenta. No other information is available. Move along, sir.

Is it worth asking what the point of such an announcement is? How exactly are we supposed to react? In what ways should we behave any differently? Do the terrorists win if we don't all become hysterical paranoiacs? Or, as John Stewart suggested last night, should the suggestion that al-Qaeda might want to disrupt our election make us suspect that the terrorists are John Kerry supporters? And that, therefore, we need to re-elect Bush so that the terrorists don't win?