Where Have You Gone, Joe
DiMaggio...Uh, Wesley Clark?
Bush wants to turn the clock back three years, past Iraq and the Patriotic Act, to his “Nuremburg moment” in Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, when 50,000+ roared the chant “Bush… Bush…Bush!”
As usual, the only obstacle between George Bush and his objective is the truth.
The truth, as represented today by Thomas Kean’s 9/11 Commission.
Bush, hiding behind the soft, ample backside of Dennis Hastert, is determined to short-circuit the commission’s work by a) not giving it an extra two months to overcome the blatant stonewalling of his administration and b) not ordering National Insecurity Enabler Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly before the commission.
But it appears likely that the commission will be able to determine that the Bush administration disregarded explicit warnings from the intelligence services about an al Qaeda attack.
Not a smoking gun for impeachment, perhaps, but it would remove another foundation brick from the increasingly shaky edifice that is George W. Bush, wartime president.
Because once you get past the pictures of Bush embracing heroic firemen in the ruins of the Twin Towers like a drunken sailor hanging on a lamppost, the bottom line is that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch.
He had already been president for almost a year, the national security apparatus reported to him, and the famous buck is supposed to stop on his desk.
His best defense for such a catastrophic failure has been, “Nobody could imagine an attack of such boldness”.
But the scuttlebutt appears to be that Bush received a pretty unambiguous warning about the mounting danger of an unconventional al-Qaeda attack.
If Bush knew (with a lower case k, instead of the upper case K as in Bush was on bin-Laden’s e-mail notification list for upcoming terrorist attacks), his post-9/11 heroics dwindle into the desperate day late and a dollar short scuttling of someone intent on obscuring his previous failures and omissions.
That sounds more like our George, doesn’t it?
Somebody has to step up to the plate and take on Bush on 9/11.
Inject 9/11 into the campaign, get it some media air and space, just like Howard Dean did for Iraq and Michael Moore and Peter Jennings and Wesley Clark did for the Bush’s AWOL TANGo.
The trouble is, as Bush gets singed in the resulting political firestorm, the igniting Democrat tends to get consumed. Dean and Clark got toasted.
But Democrats can also rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
I think it’s time for Clark to be resurrected as the Democrat’s national security voice, and confront Bush on 9/11 on Kerry and Edwards’ behalf.
This election year, when Bush tries to throw his shaky 9/11 curve, I think the Democrats will be able to hit it out of the park.
All we need to do is get our slugger into the batter’s box.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
