Providing cover for Phil Gramm's resignation from Rape Joke Johnny's campaign, perhaps?

The news just broke during Countdown that all of a sudden, the McCain campaign has decided that Phil Gramm's branding of people like me as "whiners" and his role in not just the Enron scandal but also in creating the mortgage mess, was just too much, and he's now underneath the Straight Talk Express instead of on it:

John McCain's campaign just released the following statement from Gramm:

"It is clear to me that Democrats want to attack me rather than debate Senator McCain on important economic issues facing the country. That kind of distraction hurts not only Senator McCain's ability to present concrete programs to deal with the country's problems, it hurts the country. To end this distraction and get on with the real debate, I hereby step down as Co-Chair of the McCain Campaign and join the growing number of rank-and-file McCain supporters."

Who's whining now, Mr. Gramm?

But with McCain following up his curious statement in Philadelphia last month that he'll be the underdog until a few hours before the polls close in Pennsylvania with a prediction of "spectacular" attacks in Iraq around the time of the U.S. elections (perhaps Bush has told him something), the news that in the last two years, McCain has attended ZERO of his own committee's hearings on Afghanistan, the fact that John McCain pockets his own Social Security check even though he is a) still working; and b) calls the program "a disgrace", and the fact that the freaks he surrounds with in his campaign deciding that joking about how women love to be raped just shows how "authentic" McCain is -- well, it hasn't exactly been a banner week for Captain Codpiece II: Electric Boogaloo.

So cue Skeletor himself -- Michael Chertoff -- to remind Americans that OMG YOU'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!

European terrorists are trying to enter the United States with European Union passports, and there is no guarantee officials will catch them every time, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.

[snip]

In his last scheduled appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, Chertoff said that the more time and space al-Qaida and its allies have to recruit, train, experiment and plan, the more problems the U.S. and Europe will face down the road.

"The terrorists are deliberately focusing on people who have legitimate Western European passports, who don't appear to have records as terrorists," Chertoff told lawmakers. "I have a good degree of confidence we can catch people coming in. But I have to tell you ... there's no guarantee. And they are working very hard to slip by us."

Chertoff and other intelligence officials have delivered similar warnings before, and he offered no new information about specific threats or an imminent attack.

So let me see if I have this straight. If I go to an airport, I have to take off my shoes, take my laptop out of its case, and carry no more than 3 ounces of any liquid on the plane with me. In some airports I may be scanned by machines that actually DO what those X-ray glasses that used to be advertised in comic books claimed to do. We have the Bush Administration scooping up every phone call we make, every web site we visit, every e-mail we send or receive.

And Chertoff not only KNOWS that European terrorists are coming in, but says nothing can be done to stop it.

If this is the case, then why the hell do AMERICANS need to put up with all this surveillance? And why does anyone still defend this level of complete and utter incompetence and stupidity?