« Find your polling place | Main | Oops...they did it again »

October 26, 2004

Ostrich+Sand=Bush

John Kerry is pushing hard the last week of the campaign, going after Bush for not accepting the consequences of his mistakes and refusing to confront the problems he's created.

And Kerry has quite a list to choose from when it comes to citations of Bush's bad decisions. There's a series of twistedly awful demonstrations of incompetence.

It begins with 9/11. The Bush team ignored eight months of warnings about Al Qaida, actively pursing an agenda of cold war style policies. Even in the face of very alarming warnings specifically including Bin Laden and hijackings, the Administration rebuffed them in favor of it's focus on missile defense and whatever the antithesis of Clinton policy they could find. This was a fundamental betrayal of the trust Americans had placed with Bush.

Then there's the actively misleading and trumped up intel on Iraq's WMD. The complete and total reliance by the Bush team with a known criminal in Ahmed Chalabi is inexcusable. Cheney camping out at the CIA, pushing for intel to back the case to invade Iraq. Trotting out Colin Powell to make a case for aluminum tubes that were known by government experts to be impossible for the uses Powell testifyed to.

Then there's Abu Ghraib. This issue is the poster child for gross negligence and incompetence by Bush. The damage to our national security by this issue is yet unknown but could theoretically be the greatest recruiting tool the Iraqi insurgency and Al Qaida have at their disposal.

And of course the recent revelations on large quantities of RMX and HMX explosives that have gone missing in Iraq. This issue is a metaphor for just how badly Iraq has been handled. And it's also a master class on media spin. The Bush team and it's surrogates have been working overtime to turn this story into someone else's fault.

Incidentally, if you're interested in the details of that issue, go see Josh Marshall. You can start at the top and work your way down...there's a lot.

So according to Bush and his supporters:

9/11 was Clinton's fault.

Trumped up and bad intel on Iraq was the CIA's fault.

They never actually depended on Chalabi and they weren't close to him (never mind those pesky pictures of Chalabi right behind Laura during the SOTU)

Abu Ghraib is the fault of the soldiers on the scene.

Al Qaqaa's missing deadly explosives are the fault of...the IAEA..or maybe Saddam took them...(even though the US knew the site contained huge caches of weapons and would have been monitoring the site via satellite, knocking out any truck convoy with the complete air superiority we had over Hussein)...but it's not Bush's fault.

Responsibility is a four letter word to these people (Perhaps literally to Bush).

Posted by Carla at October 26, 2004 10:50 AM