May 17, 2002

Dems Attack Bush For Not Preventing 9/11 Attacks

Echoing Pearl Harbor charges against FDR, Democrats are suddenly attacking President Bush, claiming that the government had enouygh information to have taken some kind of action to prevent it. Two MetaFilter posts [ one | two] hit the nail on head.

First:

I don't like Dubya any more than the next liberal, but he's getting a bum rap here. Pre 911, post 93, the Feds have been getting so many warnings about terrorist attacks both foreign and domestic, their manpower was worn thin researching the validity of each threat. My guess is they had inside jokes about the ones that came more often. The repeating motifs. A lot of threats found their way on a table gathering dust, or maybe file thirteen.
Anyone ever hear the one about the boy who cried wolf? I'm sure Osama has. He played us like fools.

Exactly. It's easy to see now, in hindsight, that some of these leads and guesses may have been accurate, but that doesn't count all the numerous times the President received false warnings.

Second, even if we had separted out these particular clues as more meaningful than others, I haven't seen anyone raise a plausible proposal for what exactly the government should have done.

If there had been even an attempt to respond to the threats that now apparently were known before 9/11, everyone in the country - left, right, and center - would have been righteously indignant at the brazen attempt to strip away our civil liberties.

The thing aboust partisanship is this: it's not enough to criticize; you've got to have some kind of viable alternative. Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle and the others never have. Even when the hostility between President Clinton and the Republican Congress was at its deepest, the Republicans were always offering an alternative plan: tax cuts, not tax hikes; shrink welfare, don't grow it; tell the truth under oath, don't commit perjury. Democrats criticizing Bush for not doing anything more than they could have done had they held the White House have failed to offer any sort of real alternative - which is the ultimate duty of the opposition party.

Besides revealing much about the Democrats' willingness to lay blame without accepting responsibility, the real lesson to be learned here is that there were significant intelligence failures which increased our vulnerability to this kind of attack. If the Dems were sincere in their desire to fix the problem, rather than electioneer, they'd address that instead of trying to blame Bush.

Posted by wasylik at May 17, 2002 01:16 PM
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