The Only Verdict That Matters
By Mitch Berg
For those days when Swiftee and Anti-Strib are just too damn oblique and tactful, Cigar Mike at Babalu gets specific:
They don’t want to admit it. They like to say things are more dangerous here today than they were pre 9/11, but the fact is they are so full of caca that they will come up with some other inane argument (stolen from Noam Chomsky) to say something to the contrary. They’re tearing down their Obama altars since they are pissed that not enough “progressives” have been appointed to the cabinet, and will continue to blame Bush for everything including the festering sores on their bodies.
If only Mike would learn to open up and express himself.
Mike, of course, directs us to Peggy Noonan, who is – well, less obstreporous, but makes a similar point:
She notes:
This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.
To some extent both sides have to swim through weed-choked hypothetical ponds – Bush’s critics will be right, to some extent, in saying “you can’t know what might have happened!”.
But we know what did not happened – the thing that has happened to countries that tried to steer a “moderate” course on the issue – nations like India and Indonesia, who’ve been pummeled by terror strikes since 9/11.
The thing that everyone sincerely believed would happen, inevitably, about this time seven years ago.
If Obama does as well, it’ll largely be due to Bush’s efforts, unpopular as they turned out to be (in 51% of the US, at least temporarily).
December 5th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
“For those days when Swiftee and Anti-Strib are just too damn oblique and tactful”
Tactful Tom Swift is like a perpetual motion machine or Cold Fusion, it’s reputed, but never actually proven to have happened Anti-Strib, their tactful commentary is a little bit more like trying to find an honest lawyer on K street in DC.
December 5th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Actually, P, you might not even get arguments from the principals involved.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Having lived the nightmare of watching helplessly (due largely to policy and somewhat to fiscal constraints) as jumbo jets slammed into my countrymen, I can atest to the fact that current policy has enabled the forces that were/are meant to stand between our citizens and the evil people of the world to quietly do their job requiring exponentially less “luck” to succeed than in the early post-9/11 days.
December 6th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
(tact) Peeve…bite me assnozzle…(/tact)
December 7th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Fingers remembered: “Having lived the nightmare of watching helplessly (due largely to policy and somewhat to fiscal constraints) as jumbo jets slammed into my countrymen”
On TV I bet. Almost as scary as Terminator 2.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am
No, from the floor of the air operations center charged with preventing attack, by air, of our country. Unfortunately, at that time the structure was designed to counter the Soviet/former soviet threat with “hijacked” airliners being the sole responsibility of law enforcement–read FBI. It was like watching your kid get punched in the face while you stood by in handcuffs and a straight jacket!
No I wasn’t at ground zero, but have been fighting the uphill battle to make sure it can’t happen again, ever since.
All partisan-ship aside, expanding the DoD mission to include being prepared to blow our own citizens out of the sky to prevent another attack on our major infastructure and citizenry is akin to asking one to prepare to shoot one of ones brothers so the rest of the family won’t get struck.
God bless the individuals in the current administration who took swift (especially for government) action to enable a multi-agency approach to prevent further enemy activity while avoiding draconian measures that would have stolen the very concepts of freedom under which we live.
not as personally scarey as getting shot at over Bosnia, Kuwait or Iraq while enforcing this and other administration’s policies–been there, done that, but in a terrible psychological way, much worse!
To paraphrase George C. Scott in “Patton” –“no poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country, he won the war by making the other poor bastard die for his.” The problem is defining “win” by making citizens, we are sworn to protect and defend die for their fellow citizens. Anyone who doesn’t have a visceral reaction to that has been playing too much Doom!