Back in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration was spinning frantically to come up with an effective rationale for going to war. Understandably, they chose fear as a tool to make their argument; if we didn’t go to Iraq, they argued, the result could be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan.

Since then, the administration has used the fear card to buy breathing room whenever that have wanted to shift attention away from their own actions. Unflattering press coverage or bad poll numbers? An orange alert is only a John Ashcroft press conference away.

Based upon the past three years, it should come as no surprise that the administration is using fear to illustrate the consequences of voting for John Kerry. Their message up till now was simply that Kerry was too soft to lead the war on terrorism, but that was stepped up several notches yesterday when Dick Cheney said the following:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

It is bad enough when various Republican partisans claim that Al Queda wants Kerry to win. But now we have the Vice President of the United States alluding that, if Kerry were to be elected, the result would be a “devastating” act of terrorism.

It’s nice to see the high road remain untraveled.