Thursday, March 25, 2004

Bush could have done more to stop 9/11...

Admit it guys, it's true. Bush did not spend as much time as he might have on the War on Terror in the 7-plus months he had between his inauguration and the 9/11 attacks, and he was distracted by other issues.

1) Al Gore reneged on his concession to Bush and kept things dragging for weeks before he'd acknowledge what more honorable people had known since Election Day - that Bush had won the election. The Democrats continued to suggest that Bush was an "illegitimate" President, and we still run into plenty of moonbats willing to say that he was "selected, not elected". This had to be countered if his Presidency was to be able to function effectively.

2) The Democrats did what they could to deny Bush his Cabinet choices, particularly with John Ashcroft. It would have been nice to have an Attorney General available sooner to help with what later came to be called "homeland security". But the all-partisan all-the-time Democrats were more afraid of a Christian like the ones who wrote the Constitution than they were of a radical Muslim group that had already attacked the US repeatedly before.

3) Rather than clean out a lot of the existing bureaucrats, he kept on those with a long-standing record of failure like Richard Clarke and used other vipers like Joseph Wilson.

4) Senator Jim Jeffords, nominally a Republican, chose to vote for Tom Daschle for Senate Majority Leader in 2001, making it more difficult for Bush to get business done in Congress.

I'm sure there are plenty more. The general idea is that if you try to tie the President's hands, then don't come back and fuss about what he ought to have done about what ought not to be a partisan issue. And if you don't want the President to be distracted, then don't hold silly hearings like this, especially during election season.

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