Moron on Saturday

[bellemontagne]

Speaking of Morons, a friend of mine sent this to me...

 

LIARS, MORONS, OR BOTH? Tue May 21, 9:02 PM ET By Ted Rall

 

The Beginning of the End for George W. Bush

 

NEW YORK-It only lasted a few seconds, but on May 17 George W. Bush had a

Bill Clinton moment, and it was magical. "Had I known that the enemy was

going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning," George W. Bush

reassured us, "I would have done everything in my power to protect the

American people." Did he realize how much he sounded like his prevaricating

predecessor? Were the subject something other than the murder of 3,000

innocent people, such desperate dissembling would be absolutely hilarious.

 

In the circus of insolent hypocrites which is the Bush Administration, the

best lines are reserved for the ringmaster. On that same day the creepy Dick

Cheney (news - web sites) warned Democrats not to "seek political advantage

by making incendiary suggestions...that the White House had advance

information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9-11. Such

commentary," Cheney emphasized, "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally

unworthy of national leaders in a time of war."

 

First: what war? And when it comes to "political advantage," it's the

Bushies, not the Democrats, who have taken advantage of 9-11 to further a

partisan political agenda. They used the dead of New York, Pennsylvania and

Washington to push such Republican platform planks as "fast track" signing

authority on free trade agreements, Internet censorship, tax cuts for the

super rich and drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To

be sure, there's a war going on: a PR war. And now that Democrats are

finally scoring a few points of their own, the Bushies who have been

slamdunking for months are screaming foul.

 

"Bush Knew," the New York Post screamed last week. Did he? Hell if I know.

Here's a man who subverted constitutional law in order to seize the White

House in a judicial coup d'état, who claimed while campaigning to be a

"compassionate conservative" but turned into a Genghis Khan right-winger as

soon as he took office, and who told us upfront after 9-11 that his

administration would routinely lie for the sake of the "war on terror." No

one can deny that the Bushies and their corporate sponsors benefited

enormously from 9-11; the post-Taliban Afghan pipeline deal (closed March 7

in Islamabad) alone is worth billions of dollars. Under normal

circumstances, even the suggestion that a president would deliberately stand

idly by as his citizens were slaughtered en masse would be appalling. George

W. Bush, however, tells Congress to go to hell whenever it requests

documents or summons his staff to testify. Such a man is capable of

anything.

 

There's no smoking gun-evidence that Bush was told about the exact specifics

of 9-11-so far. But it's hard to escape an inevitable, disturbing conclusion

that itself bears consideration: We are in the hands of liars, morons or

both.

 

When Terrormemogate first hit the airwaves, the administration trotted out

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), who serves as

chief of Bush's Counterterrorism Security Group, to face the media. Rice

repeatedly asserted that pre-9-11 threats of airplane hijackings had been so

vague as to be useless. This is somewhat believable: any firefighter can

tell you that false alarms outnumber real fires. Given such a generalized

threat, you'd order your Air Force to a state of high alert. "Traditional"

hijackings, after all, tend to end badly. You'd keep planes in the air and

many more on the ground, ready to scramble at a second's notice. Then, if

and when the predicted hijackings materialized, you could track the planes

and order them shot down if necessary. If months went by without any

hijackings, you might decide to lower the nation's state of readiness.

 

On the morning of September 11th, though, just eight fighters were assigned

to defend The United States of America's 3,618,770-square-mile air space.

And they were piloted by weekend warriors, members of the Air National

Guard. The jets weren't even in the air-they were sitting on the ground at

the time of the attacks. Our state of readiness, despite the huge military

defense budget that sucks millions away from starving children, compared

unfavorably to Thailand's.

 

By Rice's own admission, the Bush Administration ignored the vague,

imprecise threats of which Bush was informed during his month-long August

vacation, simply because they didn't specify exact times and dates. To hear

her tell it, our government-our safety-is in the hands of idiots.

 

"Administration officials insisted all last week that turning a plane into a

suicide bomb was something that nobody had contemplated," Time magazine

reports in its May 27th issue. "But that just isn't so. In 1995, authorities

in the Philippines scuppered a plan-masterminded by Razmi Yousef, who had

also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing-for mass hijackings of

American planes over the Pacific. Evidence developed during the

investigation of Yousef and his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad, uncovered a plan

to crash a plane into CIA (news - web sites) headquarters in Langley, Va.

And as long ago as 1994, in an incident that is well known among terrorism

experts, French authorities foiled a plot by the Algerian Armed Islamic

Group to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower."

 

So Rice was either clueless or lying: everybody knew that Islamist jihadis

had plotted suicide hijackings well before 9-11. Nevertheless, the Bushies

did nothing to improve airline security. They did nothing to prepare for the

possibility of hijackings, whether suicide or traditional. They didn't even

tell the airlines what they knew. Then, after 9-11, they covered up the fact

that they had received numerous warnings.

 

Moron Bush or Liar Bush-would one of you please resign?

[Dru]

What about Chimp?