Message From Bathroom Bunker: This Stinks

The coming war has turned hundreds of readers into writers, and I’d need Hans Blix and his inspections team to help me sift through the entire mailbag. But one e-mail in particular caught my eye:

Sam Brunstein, a retired electrical engineer who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is preparing a “safe room” in his Burbank house.

Brunstein, 73, beat the rush on duct tape and plastic sheeting. He bought those things several weeks ago to turn his bathroom into a shelter for himself and his wife, Marie. The experience, he says, has transported him back to the madness of the duck-and-cover days of the Cold War.

But he’s heard that Israelis have used tape and plastic as a temporary guard against bio-weapons, and says it’s “better than nothing.”

So here we are in the year 2003, civilization having advanced to the point where a gent in Burbank tells his wife he’s going to turn the bathroom into a cave. The wife shrugs and says OK.

And Sam taps away at his keyboard, gathering his fear and rage, getting the last paragraph of his e-mail just the way he wants it. It’s not the foreign despots who got him worried enough to build a bunker, he says. Oh no. It’s a different crowd entirely.

“Bush, Ashcroft and company are the scariest bunch on the horizon to me right now,” he writes. “Scarier than Hussein or Kim Jong Il. Because the Bushies are going to rattle everyone’s cage until something bad happens.”

Thank you, Sam. If you hadn’t said it first, I would have.

(Note to readers: Before you rush to your computer or phone to call me a liar, a lout, a moron, a traitor, or hit me with the still-popular “you probably loved Bill Clinton,” please be aware that these charges have already been filed. Also, allow me to clarify that I would gladly volunteer to nail Osama bin Laden’s manhood to the floor, set his cave on fire and hand him a rusty razor, which is precisely my point. We are chasing the wrong guy!)

But the Bush administration isn’t the only culprit.

For all the marching in the streets of late, it took far too long for the public to wake up. And please stop telling me it’s the media’s fault because the crowd estimates of the last march weren’t big enough. We’re far from perfect, but for months, the newspaper has been filled, every single day, with hundreds of reasons to shake a fist. So stick that in your next mass e-mail calling for a boycott of the press.

Now on to the Democrats.

Only one Democrat of note -- U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia -- has had the backbone to stand up to the White House. But he waited way too long to flog his colleagues for sitting like mummies during the march to a war that could backfire 6 million ways. More terrorist hits on our soil, for instance.

“To engage in war is always to pick a wild card,” said Byrd. “And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any president who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is in the highest moral traditions of our country.”

There’s another thing you haven’t heard Washington discuss -- the casualties. As in, how many there might be, and how many is too many. There was talk that dead American soldiers would be cremated in the Middle East if they were contaminated with chemical or biological weapons, though the Pentagon has since said “cremation is not an option.”

But I digress.

“Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good,” Byrd said. “We cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone.”

To put it another way, we’re all stick and no carrot, and we’re making more enemies around the world than friends.

“The flaunting of international conventions and regimes has been shameful,” says UCLA political science professor Richard Baum. “From the Kyoto agreement, to land mines, to the international courts -- anything that’s inconvenient for us, we blow off.”

He forgot to mention the U.N., which the U.S. has snubbed for weeks.

“The French, the Belgians, the Germans, the Russians and others are whispering in corridors and conspiring behind our backs, and it’s not surprising,” Baum says. “We have to get back to where the people of the world respect us rather than just fear us.”

It might be too late.

We’ve got a president who’s obsessed with this war, and talks about it like a football coach on his way to the Super Bowl.

We’ve got an attorney general who wants us to believe it’s in our best interest to have him peek through everyone’s window.

And we’ve got a guy in Burbank, preparing a bunker in his bathroom. It’s got a phone in there, he told me.

Yeah, but who can you call?

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Reach Steve Lopez at steve.lopez@latimes.com