Images of President Bush threatened with a pistol and self-refuting “artistic” complaints about the “death of civil liberties”—now featured just in time for September 11, near Ground Zero in Manhattan. (Hat tip: Soccer Dad.)

An art exhibit that trashes the U.S. flag - and portrays images of terror on the streets of New York - is about to open near Ground Zero to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11.

The show ridicules the war on terror, depicts the death of civil liberties - and features the image of a cocked pistol pointed at the head of President Bush in a work entitled, “Patriot Act.”

While it’s privately funded, “A Knock on the Door” has been organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which receives money from New York City and state taxpayers and the Port Authority.

The cultural council, which promotes the art scene downtown, says the show, pegged to Sept. 11, is intended to “raise public awareness of the current retreat of our most basic rights.”

It will debut Sept. 8 in two locations, the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, 8 blocks from Ground Zero, and Cooper Union’s Great Hall Gallery. Both institutions get government aid.

“This is a slap in the face to anyone who holds Sept. 11 to be a sacred day,” said Edie Lutnick, executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, whose brother Gary, 36, died in Tower 1. “I’m not saying the families oppose culture, or that controversial art can’t be displayed. But why do it on that day? Where’s the common sense?”

Adds Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles, 51, was the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, “These images will inflict needless pain to promote the careers of narcissists on a day when we should reflect on heartbreak and altruism.”

Tom Healy, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council president, counters, “We’re not trying to be offensive to anyone, and we’re not out to make political statements. This is meant to be an investigation into issues of security and patriotism in the post-9/11 environment.” …

Among artworks on display:

Chicago artist Al Brandtner’s “Patriot Act” features 42 mock postage stamps with Bush’s image - and a 9-mm. handgun leveled at his head. When exhibited in Chicago in April, Secret Service agents photographed it and launched a probe of the artist.

“It was a show of intimidation,” Brandtner told the Daily News yesterday. “The work was done tongue and cheek. The idea was for people who didn’t like George Bush to look at it and laugh.”

Also hanging at the Seaport will be his “Flag: Study in White No. 1,” an upside-down and whitewashed U.S. flag. “The colors have been washed out,” he said. “It shows the eroding of civil liberties in America.”

North Carolina artist Lisa Charde echoes that theme in “The (un)Patriotic(ic) Act,” in which a straitjacket patterned after the flag portrays the supposed shackles on America’s freedoms.

Baltimore artist Christina Nguyen Hung’s “Experiments in Resistance With Bleach” portrays insidious bacteria in a petri dish eating away at sections of the First Amendment.

New Jersey artist Grace Graupe-Pillard’s “Interventions” takes images from the war in Iraq - car bombings, erupting flames, puddles of blood - and puts them on the streets of Manhattan to portray the “politics of fear” in “our own backyard.”