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.

I got this weekend off, so I’m cramming into two days all the stuff I imagined I’d be doing when I first heard I was going to be spending a month at Disney World.

Even though I’ve been to Disney World more times than a normal person would admit to, I still see something new every trip. This time (as a guest, anyway), it’s been the water parks. Today I started at Typhoon Lagoon and found my new hands-down favorite thing to do in the entire resort. It’s called Castaway Creek, and it’s a river that runs around the entire park with various places you can get in or out. You get on one of the inner tubes and let the current take you gradually around the entire length of the river, under bridges, past waterfalls, through caves, and into a misty rain forest area.

It’s awesome. From now on, whenever anyone asks what I’d rather be doing, my answer is “lying and floating.” I intentionally left my watch and cell phone back at the hotel, but I estimate that an entire circuit around the river takes thirty minutes, and I must’ve gone around two and a half times at least.

I also rode the new “Crush’n Gusher” water coaster they’ve installed, and it was fun enough but no big deal. I would’ve hit the other slides and then taken another couple of hours in the river, but they closed the park on account of approaching thunderstorms.

The thunderstorms finally hit once I was on Big Thunder Mountain at the Magic Kingdom. (I’d stopped by Epcot and rode Mission: Space, and it was every bit as headache-inducing and uncomfortable and anti-climactic as I’d remembered). The rain washed out any hope of riding anything else, since it drove all the people into the ride queues and I didn’t feel like waiting, but it cleared up long enough for the fireworks. All totaled it was a pretty good day. Still not as fun as going to the parks with other people, but there’s something to be said for doing whatever you feel like doing on your own schedule without having to wait (or make them wait for you to finish smoking).

Tomorrow I’m planning on riding Expedition Everest again, then heading to the other water park Blizzard Beach. At the moment, I’ve got the kind of tired that comes only after a day filled with age-inappropriate activities, so I’m going to dream about fireworks and inner tubes and Gary Sinise spinning me at 4Gs.

The Orlando Sentinel put up a video covering the Team Possible game at Epcot, and it came out pretty good. You can watch it here (assuming you’re running Windows; I can’t figure out how to get it to play in Safari).

The video has a lot of interviews with the VP of Imagineering R&D talking about the game, interspersed with shots of kids playing it and of several of the effects in action. I’m still planning on going through the game with a video camera sometime next week, but I doubt I’ll do as good a job capturing the effects as the professionals did.