April 11, 2004, The Bush Leagues...
Thank God baseball season is under way... the President can ponder the job he REALLY wants (you know-- the one Bud Selig now has)...
First, in e-mail exchanges with Diana Moon, she sends me this amusing Richard Reeves article suggesting that President Bush, having been let down at every turn by his team (everyone from Rummy and Wolfy and Condi to Colin and Richard Milhaus Cheney), should fire them all. Mr. Reeves has one hell of a sense of humor: Bush firing any, let alone all, of these people, would be like Charlie McCarthy firing Edgar Bergen, or Madam firing Waylon Flowers, or... you get the idea...
In brief, let me say this about the 6 August 2001 briefing: it is devastating. All the spin in the world will not save Bush from this, for one simple reason. It was BUSH whose answer to any question, from his otherwise miserable foreign policy record, his miserable economic and fiscal record, his miserable educational or health care or environmental record- was "9-11, 9-11, 9-11", i.e., as bad a manager as I am at EVERYTHING-- at least your life is in less danger than with some pussy DEMOCRAT in charge. That's now over. If Bush mentions 9-11, he will then have to immediately answer for why his government did nothing discernible, despite knowing the who, what, where, why and how (and for all we know, the redacted portions said when and which flight numbers) of 9-11 over 5 weeks before it.
You see-- Condi, Condi, Condi-- there was an EASY OUT! And that would have been-- from the very second Clark released his statements-- but OF COURSE WE WERE ON IT!!! The memo says there were seventy different bin Laden plots being investigated-- we were just weeks-- maybe days-- away from thwarting them. You know what? THAT is what every American (not just New Yorkers who lost their jobs and couldn't sleep for a while because they were a block away from the WTC on 11 September 2001) desperately wants to hear.
Instead, we were treated to tales of Al Qaeda superman status, and how this could never have been predicted or stopped. That's been the story: from Goodfellas (why does Condi always make me think of the mafia?) real greaseball shit, there was nothin' we could do about it.
In short, the 8-6-01 briefing memo by itself is not devastating to the Bush Administration because, by itself, there is sufficient ambiguity in it not to bring a government down. The reason it is devastating is because the REST of Bush's record is a fucking disaster-- and as he can no longer hide behind 9-11 and cow the questioners into silence, Bush will have to now deal with it-- the rest of his record, that is-- like the disappearance of over 3,000,000 jobs on his watch, or the trillions of dollars he has needlessly added to the deficit.
Which takes us to another part of the brilliant Bush agenda (the Iraq war), where this time, our friends in Beijing at the People's Daily teach us about how to properly run an occupation, noting (as has Unqualified Offerings) that the heavy handed treatment of Sadr's newspaper led directly to this. Americans, first thought of kindly as liberators, by arbitrarily arresting people, protecting selected (oil related) property and ignoring selected (everything else) property, and life in general (firing willy nilly at crowds), are now perceived as what we actually are: invaders (I do not cast any aspersions on our own troops, none of whom chose this particular deployment or decided to have this discretionary war). The problem is... we bought ourselves the possibility of Shiites and Sunnis coming together. To attack the United States. Needless to say, we got trouble. Right here in Tigris and Euphrates River City. (And that trouble starts with "B", who, speaking from Crawford, once again vowed to uphold the June 30th sovereignty turnover date-- reality be damned).
I tell you-- last week, Beijing told us about free trade; this week about how to respect human rights in the course of a military campaign... if this keeps up, I'm going to start going to the People's Daily as my regular voice of reason, soon-- not like the kneejerk fascist cheerleader mouthpieces over at CNN and the Washington Post, or even the New York Times...
Well, Happy Easter, everybody!!!
Comments
Where's the problem? He found out that al Qaeda was going to attack, and immediately cut taxes to prevent it from happening. We now know that cutting taxes isn't 100% effective in counter-terrorism, but that's hindsight. It has to be supplemented with business deregulation.
Posted by Zizka at April 11, 2004 07:22 PM
The memo says there were 70 different FBI investigations. To conflate this with 70 different al Qaeda plots is inaccurate. Those investigations probably included things unrelated to al Qaeda, things there weren't even criminal activities, and some al Qaeda plots. If there were really 70 al Qaeda plots brewing in August 2001, I'd say the Bush administration did pretty well in stopping 69 of the 70. But I suspect that in fact there were far fewer plots, and clearly the administration missed the important one. We'll see what the public reaction is to the memo, but I suspect your interpretation will not be the most common one.
Posted by Andrew at April 11, 2004 09:51 PM
"The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related."
I think you are a little caught up on my specific wording-- I think I implied that 70 different plots could very well be 70 different angles of the SAME plot... the fact is, any one of those 70 investigations could have led to the key lead that unraveled the whole thing... I remain astounded that the White House would release that much of that document, when it has been so secretive about so many less damaging things.
Its simply that the government has now spent 31 months telling us that (1) these AQ guys were supermen (they were not), (2) this was somehow ALL 100% Bill Clinton's fault (nonsense, of course; for example, the Afghan cruise missile killed lotsa AQ operatives pissing OBL off, and at least 3 highjackers, including ONE PILOT, entered via Saudi visa express in approx. May 2001-- Saudi visa express put on-line during this Bush Administration, albeit planned before), (3) "homeland security = martial law" (it does not), (4) "we had no way of knowing this was coming and it was unstoppable" (now, clearly debunked)-- and this had been the principal defense.
I could go on. I was simply saying that once stupid, stupid Condi insisted on letting that cat out of the bag (she didn't HAVE to blurt out the memo title-- that too WAS classified until she blurted it out), I think that paragraph is the ONE THING-- the ONLY THING-- the Bushies can rely on in their defense anymore.
The rest of it is beyond damning. Bush should seriously consider withdrawing his name from nomination.
Its that bad.
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