BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK
FOR: THE DEMOCRATS' OWN DEEP SLEEP ON THE 9/11 WARNINGS
by Murray Soupcoff
The
Iconoclast
May 23, 2002
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Showing
a bit more caution, now that the latest opinion polls still show strong support
for U.S. President George W. Bush (right), Democratic leaders like Tom Daschle
still can't resist one last innuendo or two in their favorite political game
of "Pin The Blame For 9/11 On The Popular Republican President".
Of course, such efforts smack of crass political opportunism, if not brazen
chutzpah. But when did such a negative perception ever stop the Democrats previously,
once they smelled the heady scent of power waiting for them behind the next
manufactured scandal?
In an insightful
editorial on Saturday May 18th, the Washington Times put the matter
in stark perspective with the following observations:
"You know what's interesting about Washington?" Mr. Bush asked an appreciative
audience as he awarded the Commander-in-Chief's trophy to the Air Force football
team, the Falcons. "It's a town, unfortunately, it's the kind of place where
second guessing has become second nature.
"The American people know this about me and my national security team and my
administration: Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill
on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect
the American people.
"We will use the might of America to protect the American people. We're in for
a long struggle. It's a tough war. It's an enemy that's not going to quit .
. . this country must have the will and the determination to chase these killers
down one by one and bring them to justice. And that's exactly what's going to
happen as long as I am president of the United States of America."
Who could doubt it? Mr. Bush's young presidency saw the unimaginable loss of
3,000 American civilian lives on September 11. It is equally unimaginable that
any U.S. president, Democrat, Republican, Whig or whatever, would have stood
by while such a threat blossomed into reality. Similar accusations against President
Franklin D. Roosevelt could never stick — that he encouraged the attack on Pearl
Harbor with inaction to draw the United States into World War II.
It takes the hacks of the Democratic Party to sink to the level of suggesting
that this president would do something like that. On Thursday, James Carville
told the ABC News Internet column, "The Note," that the question to be asked
is this, "What did the president know, when did he know it and what did he do
about it?" The president's enemies are counting on this to be the scandal with
legs. November elections are looming, and no other scandal has grown legs. The
president and his approval ratings look far too good to allow Democratic leaders
to sleep well. So they're in full throttle, clamoring, as Senate Minority Leader
Trent Lott puts it, as if "our enemy is George Bush instead of Osama bin Laden."
The sheer gall of the big Democratic lie resides in its underlying assumption
that "blame time" for 9/11 somehow only starts on the Bush watch, as if previously
there never had been a Clinton administration which for years blatantly turned
a jaundiced eye away from the international terrorist threat and all the burdens
involved in confronting it. Only one small example of this fantasy-world historical
revisionism is a recent CBS online report that talks about a key intelligence
warning of potential terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and other Washington
landmarks using hijacked planes and then blithely mentions that the report was
submitted in 1998 "to the Bush administration".
In 1998? To the Bush administration?
Gee, when the going gets tough, the Clinton administration sure gets going --
right out of existence -- especially when an opportunity opens up to chip away
at the legitimacy of a popular Republican administration in 2002.
Not surprisingly, Democratic leaders continue to clamor for an "independent"
investigation of inaction in Washington before 9/11. However, any true investigation
of the inaction in Washington would have to get to the "root causes" of the
problem (to borrow a favorite phrase of the anti-Bush clique). And the answer
-- from the Democrats' point of view -- won't be pretty.
After all, let's be realistic here. Even if the Bush team had acquired the psychic
powers of Miss Cleo in August 2001, all their efforts to nail potential hijackers
at airports would have been opposed as "racial profiling" by, well wouldn't
you know it, the same Democrats now criticizing Mr. Bush for his supposed inaction.
And any efforts by John Ashcroft to use preventive detention to deter potential
hijackers from doing harm in September would have been strenuously opposed by
you know who as a repressive 'police state measure'. And forget about any efforts
to tighten immigration and visa regulations at the time. Yes, you guessed it,
none other than the same Democrats who are denouncing Mr. Bush for his inaction
in August would have been screaming bloody murder about 'immigrant bashing'
should Mr. Bush have attempted to eliminate the many vulnerabilities built into
America's flawed pre-9/11 immigration policies at that time.
In other words, the Democrats and their liberal-left allies have been and continue
to be a big part of the problem when it comes to defending the American homeland.
So steeped is this over-politicized elite in its grab-bag of tricks for pandering
to racial and ethnic minorities and other special-interest lobbies, for short-term
political advantage, this band of power junkies seems incapable of recognizing
a genuine threat to the nation's existence and actually doing something about
it (or allowing someone more capable like the Cheney\Rice\ Rumsefeld\Ashcroft
team to actually do something about it).
Talk about inaction. The Democratic prescription for resolving crises like the
current terrorist threats to the American homeland is so mired in an inept arsenal
of "post-colonial" ideological remedies such as multiculturalism, mediation
and better understanding of "others" -- it's nothing but a recipe for national
paralysis and impotence. In other words, the liberal instinct under such a threat
is to do anything -- to try and understand, to try and reason, to try and appease,
or to try and deny the threat even exists -- anything but fight back.
Case in point. As the Washington Times points out, an al Qaeda plot to
use commercial airliners to blow up the CIA headquarters at Langley, among other
targets, was uncovered in the Philippines in 1995. It was named "Operation Bojinka,"
or "the big bang." And Vice President Al Gore was appointed to head an airport-security
task force to come up with recommendations for countering the threat.
Golly gee, what a surprise! Those recommendations were eventually rejected by
the Clinton White House as "racial profiling."
Case
in point. Each time, after the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing, the
1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, and the 2000 bombing of
USS Cole, Bill Clinton curled his lip (see left) to show his pain and resolutely
promised to track down the villains responsible for these heinous acts and bring
them to justice. Of course, preoccupied with more important affairs of state
like Monica Lewinsky, and the need to keep his poll numbers high to ward off
impeachment, he did almost nothing preventive in these matters -- except perhaps
to unleash a missile attack on a bunch of empty tents in Afghanistan and an
aspirin factory in the Sudan (and not coincidentally at a time when that Monica
matter was becoming most troublesome and in need of a good diversion). Generally,
Bill Clinton seemed to believe he could make the terrorist threat go away by
ignoring it or pretending it didn't exist.
Let's talk turkey here. Taking real preventive action on the terrorist front,
no matter how dire the threat or how scary the intelligence warnings, didn't
seem to be in Bill Clinton's play book
The Democrats may currently be salivating over the prospect of wounding the
Bush White House with a witch hunt, er, independent investigation of the Bush
administration's inaction in the months preceding 9/11. However, considering
the woeful record (past and present) of the Democratic leadership -- in dealing
with the concrete, real-life steps that were required to negate the current
terrorist threat to to the United States -- Democrats may soon regret they ever
started this whole inquisition.
As any legitimate inquiry will quickly discover, the roots of negligence and
inaction on the home front do not lie within the Bush administration. Instead,
the massive security breakdown and policy paralysis that "enabled" a disaster
like 9/11 is yet just another legacy of the "golden" Clinton years -- more unfinished
Clinton business which continues, even today, to threaten the very future of
the American nation. ***
© 2002 The
Iconoclast
Murray Soupcoff is the author of 'Canada 1984' and a former radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also was Executive Editor of We Compute Magazine for several years, and is now the Managing Editor of the popular Canadian conservative Web site, Iconoclast.ca
COPYRIGHT © 2002 BY THE AMERICAN PARTISAN. All writers retain rights to their work.
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