Don't think things look so bad now? Get a load of this

If escalating war, record debt and a malignant combination of corruption and incompetence in the nation's capital don't have you worried, you've come to the right place today.

The way I see it, if you are immune to distress over very real debacles, you need to start banging your head over fake ones.

I have a modest example here.

As far as I can tell, the story was broken by Human Events, that venerable publication of American conservatism that has always preferred being right to being correct. On June 12, it published this breathless lead by Jerome R. Corsi:

"Quietly but systematically, the Bush administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football fields wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn." (NAFTA is the acronym for the North American Free Trade Act.)

Corsi goes on to suggest the highway is intended to permit Mexican trucks to carry goods from "the Far East" into the heart of this country and to Canada "all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks." And those Mexican trucks won't even have to stop at the U.S. border. They will roll straight through to a new computerized customs stop "being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City."

"The American public is largely asleep to this key piece of the coming 'North American Union' that government planners in the new trilateral region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into reality," Corsi writes.

You haven't heard about the North American Union? Well, you know about the European Union, don't you? This is going to be this continent's answer to it, complete with a new unit of currency, the amero.

Take that, euro.

Like a lot of conspiracy theories, this one metastasizes from a kernel of truth. Corsi points to an organization known as NASCO, or North America's SuperCorridor Coalition. NASCO's Web site says it is a nongovernmental outfit that encourages "trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America."

It says it does that however, through existing highways, especially Interstate 35.

"There are no plans to build a new NAFTA Superhighway -- it exists today as I-35," the site says.

A likely story. After the Human Events story hit the Internet, right-wing publications, Web sites, bloggers and assorted wing nuts began exploding in ire.

The New American, the John Birch Society's glossy magazine, ran an Aug. 7 story complete with a comic-style cover showing people fleeing a huge bulldozer ripping up the American landscape, notably including a steepled church.

"All across America, mammoth construction projects are preparing to launch," the lead tells us. Not long after the highway is built, Kelly Taylor's article warns, borders will disappear, the last manufacturing plants in this country will be moved to what is now Mexico, and millions of us in what used to be the good old USA will lose our jobs.

And who are the villains in this piece, besides President Bush that is? Yep, they are the ever popular Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, the Birchers' biggest bugaboos since the Iron Curtain fell.

Wait! There's more. According to "NAFTA Highway to Hell" on the site knowledgedrivenrevolution. com, the real purpose of the highway isn't so much trade as it is population control.

"This is just a lying excuse to create a militarized no-man's land to cut the country in half and prevent travel from Sector East to Sector West and vice-versa," it says.

Another alert site, prisonplanet. com, elaborates, saying the scheme also includes national identification cards that every American citizen will be forced to carry.

Various sites disagree on who will actually own the new highway. No, it won't be you taxpayers; you're just paying for it. Some say the owner will be China, or Red China, as the site calls it. Another says it will be the king of Spain. That's right: the king of Spain.

Frightened yet?

If not, I have one last chance to spoil your day. The satirical Web site The Onion goes all these revelations one better, and much earlier. May 15, 2002, it presaged the NAFTA Super Highway with this lead:

"WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After nearly nine years of construction, the Mexi-Canadian Overpass, the controversial $4.3 trillion highway overpass linking Guadalupe and Winnipeg, was finally completed last week, drawing harsh criticism from U.S. citizens and officials alike."

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Fisher is editor of the Tribune's editorial page. His e-mail address is jfisher@lmtribune.com.