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If anyone is surprised over why President Bush and Dick Cheney are seeking to win the upcoming election by shamelessly evoking the tragedy and dread of Sept. 11, 2001, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and trying to scare the tar out of people by hammering on the likelihood of upcoming terrorist attacks, then they have been far away from America in the past 44 months.

What else do they have to run on? Just consider the many disappointments, inconsistencies -- you could definitely call them flip-flops! -- and downright failures in the Bush-Cheney record.

Bush blasted Al Gore in 2000 for his nation-building tendencies and then went out and got us into a unilateral nation-building adventure in Iraq that is looking more and more like a disastrous civil war, a bloody and expensive long-term quagmire.

He promised to be a "uniter" who would change "politics as usual" in Washington -- and yet his domestic policies have split the country, his pre-emptive war has earned the United States the ire, disgust and mistrust of much of the world, and his support of the agenda of large corporations at every turn has resulted in a virtual war on the blue-collar worker as his corporate friends send their jobs to India and China at an accelerating clip.

He portrayed himself as a "compassionate conservative," but Bush's America is marred by a declining number of children covered by health insurance, the continued deterioration of public schools as his No Child Left Behind program results in little more than "No Child Left Untested," and unemployed industrial and other blue-collar workers lining up at food banks and soup kitchens for free food as their jobs are sent overseas.

And he masqueraded as a budget conservative, but as truly fiscally responsible members of his own party understand well, he is bleeding the Treasury with an expensive and increasingly unpopular war and looking the other way as large corporations use tax cuts to pay their executives astronomical salaries way, way out of line with those of increasingly pinched working class folks.

All this, and Bush calls John Kerry a flip-flopper? The President deserves an Olympic Gold Medal for flip-flopping, hands-down!

Nick Hinds

Steamboat Springs