Cheney the Yawner sure has a way of issuing wake-up calls.

From Des Moines, Iowa, last week, the monotone veep told supporters, “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 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.”

My hurricane-numbed brain got me plotting plywood placement. I almost ducked and covered under my desk.

Oh, wait. Dick Cheney’s not a TV weatherman. He doesn’t track storms. He creates political tsunamis. Just more fear-peddling from the No. 2. And we thought Zell gave us a good scare.

This is so retro, poodle-skirt 1950s. Atomic bombs don’t do this stuff justice. Except George W. Bush is no Dwight D. Eisenhower, decorated war general, strategist extraordinaire and a man who put America’s interests for peace before the military-industrial complex’s financial interests for war.

Can you spell H-a-l-l-i-b-u-r-t-o-n?

We know Cheney’s old employer has no fear. Halliburton keeps getting no-bid contracts to mop up in Iraq and points everywhere. This used to be work that our soldiers did with great sacrifice and honor. Now we pay contractors millions of dollars more to do the same job and pretend it’s all in the name of winning the war on terror while our guys and gals are stuck in the line of fire in a country that’s still far from free.

But, hey, let’s make sure we make the right choice in November.

Every time I start to lean to the status quo, figuring it’s better the devil you know, there comes another fantastic tale of Armageddon from the Bush-Cheney campaign. Please, spare us, Monotone Man. Let’s get down to the business of what Bush-Cheney would do the next four years. How would you end this war that just a couple of weeks ago the president oops’d into admitting had no end? What’s the strategy?

We don’t dispute that America is vulnerable, that this country — heck, any nation — can be attacked by terrorists who hate us and our values. But what have our American values become three years after the horrendous attacks of 9-11?

We have lost basic civil liberties and what little privacy we had left. We’re now shut out of getting basic public information about the safety of our power plants or other critical infrastructure in the name of “national security.”

Ah, yes, we haven’t had another terrorist strike on U.S. shores.

We never had anything of the magnitude of 9-11, which happened almost a month after Bush was handed a report that clearly warned that Osama bin Laden was plotting to attack America on our shores. Do we blame him? No, because hindsight is 20/20.

Surely, Bill Clinton could have done more after the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Surely, Ronald Reagan could have done more after the attack on the Marines in Beirut. Surely, Jimmy Carter …

What would John Kerry do?

There’s nothing Kerry has said to suggest that he would let the nation “fall back into the pre-9-11 mind-set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war,” as Cheney tried to imply about Kerry.

The veep conveniently casts the choice in a way that avoids Bush’s lack of an exit strategy in Iraq. That’s the one choice Americans everywhere would love to embrace.

Myriam Marquez is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com