I finally got back to Georgia from Orlando on Friday night. Even after a month and a half in Orlando and being very ready to leave, it still ended kind of abruptly. It would’ve even been nice to have one more day there as a non-working guest, instead of just one minute being at Epcot and then the next being at the decidedly non-magical Orlando airport.

For the past week or so, I’ve had “Sloop John B” going through my head non-stop from the moment I wake up. And I’m sure that as soon as I get back to San Francisco, it’ll seem like Georgia went by in a blur, and I’ll go back to missing my family, and wishing that I could help out more around here.

But dammit, I want to go home.

It’s been over two months now; I think I’m entitled to sleep in my own bed. I always imagined I’d make a great World Traveler, but I think to do that, you have to be able to stay away from home for more than a few weeks without panicking.

I’m headed back to SF this Sunday. Technically, this would be a perfect opportunity to fulfill my plan to drive cross country — I had a one-way ticket out here, no job waiting for me back home, and some extra cash from having other people pay for my meals for the past two months. But driving from Atlanta to SF would take at least a week to do it right, and as I’ve mentioned, I want to go home.

Say what you will about George W Bush, the guy’s got balls. After invoking the memory of the brave dead, he described our enemies:

We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam, a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent.

Mixed in with the frequent Fox News-like warnings of enemies “determined to bring death and suffering into our homes,” he has the stones to mention “tolerance” and “moderation” so many times you’d think it was the Democratic National Convention.

Even though his administration and its policy of Rule By Fear has emboldened the extremists driven by their own perverted vision of Christianity. The ones who have been working around the clock since September 2001 to turn “tolerance” and “moderation” into dirty words. Words that are spit out as insults, terms almost as profane and stomach-turning as “liberal.”

The key is moderation, we learn. You can’t achieve a real totalitarian ideology that despises all dissent by flying planes into buildings. You have to work at it over time. Chip away at civil liberties. Turn your citizens against each other. Make sure there are plenty of groups left within the populace to foment fear and distrust — if Muslims aren’t available, there’s always the homos and atheists and liberals.

And make absolutely certain there’s always a nebulous enemy out there in case anyone has the temerity to point out that you’re destroying your country’s scientific development and notions of personal privacy. Just point at the Middle East, shout “Booga Booga! Bin Laden! Homeland Security!” and you’ve turned a concerned citizen into an Unpatriotic Enemy of Freedom.

Even after building his speech on the bodies of the victims of the World Trade Center attack, he has the nerve to admit that Hussein had no direct connection to 9/11 but still insists that the invasion was essential to keeping al Qaeda at bay.

So the question is whether it actually takes balls to go on national television and lie to your constituency, or whether it’s just evil.