I just called Tom Daschle an idiot on national TV!

[Nothing But Net]

Not really, but I did call him and the rest of the Dem's a bunch of idiots in the 5th largest circ paper in the US.. see it here (go to bottom of page, Saylors): http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.ht...utlook/1416208

Nice knowing you all!

[Nic Name]

Not quoted by NBN on national TV

... accusing the Bush administration of somehow anticipating the events of Sept. 11, and failing to act.

I think the gist of the criticism is for the administration's failure to anticipate and failure to act.

With information indicating the plans of Al Qaeda to use airplanes to attack builidngs that was circulating in the FBI, and even the Library of Congress, the government cannot continue to say that the concept of suicide hijackers using a planes as missiles targeting buildings in the USA could not have been anticipated by anyone. In fact, it was anticipated by several people within agencies of the government.

This is not a partisan criticism. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations should have been doing more to reform FAA, INS, CIA and FBI. That is hindsight for everyone. But it was the foresight of many others whose anticipation was not acted upon sufficiently by either administration.

The attacks of 9/11 were a wake-up for the government.

The government can't argue that, without the attacks of 9/11, they couldn't have been expected to anticipate such attacks and to prevent such attacks by eliminating known vulnerabilities. They can't seriously say they were doing everything that could reasonably be done. The government is trying to characterize this as a failure of intelligence. Well, the intelligence community is now going on the record to the extent that they can, given the limitations on their communications of classified information, to make a case that the failure was not of intelligence, but of leadership.

Everything the government is doing now to effect airport security and reform immigration and law inforcement should have been a priority of government well before 9/11. They know that now. There is a reasonable case being made that they knew or should have known that years ago.

Some argue that, although the government knew attacks of this nature were possible, even very likely, they also believed there would be no public tolerance of the limitations of civil liberties and personal inconveniences that would be required to prevent such attacks in anticipation.

They may have a point.

Maybe everyone had to get their priorities aligned for the government to do what it ought to have done, long ago.

[Nic Name]

Nice knowing you all!

Oh, by the way ... would you have been equally comfortable putting your name to a post in the Houston Chronicle expressing disgust at anything the Bush administration is doing. Hypothetically.

Or would that be unpatriotic, or at the least, unwise, knowing that Ari Fleischer has stated in a White House press conference that "people need to watch what they say."

... especially in Houston.

[Undertoad]

I assume this was the forum you were looking for when you posted in IotD? (I deleted that thread, you can thank me later, and all I can say is: friends, don't drink and post...)

I agree that Daschle is an idiot. Dick Gephardt too. There is a time to act politically, and a time to drop all that crap and just do the right thing.

Anyone who has read a Clancy book knows: there is intelligence gathering, and then there is intelligence analysis. What we are hearing is that the people doing the gathering did their job, and the people doing the analysis did not. It doesn't matter if the President was briefed with gathered intelligence; he can't possibly act on gathered intelligence, nor would we want him to. It only matters if he didn't act on heavily analyzed intelligence.

Well now wait a minute. It's easy to say the analysts didn't do their job, but the analysis is the hard part. It's easy to see how the facts fit together after the event, extremely difficult to see before the event. All of the events of history are preceded by warnings that we can see bright as day, but we still can't predict the future.

Now we see that the Senate intelligence committee got the same sorts of warnings, and those pols didn't put two and two together either, even as Feinstein felt it was interesting enough information to repeat on national TV in the summer of '01.

Now the idiot bit. I'm sure that Daschle and Gephardt understand that this is not over and that the US remains likely to be hit with continued terrorist activity. By echoing the "what did the president know and when did he know it" phrase, Gephardt is using language to suggest that this has reached the level of scandal, without coming right out and saying it's scandalous. If Gephardt says it's scandalous, then the problem sticks to him if it isn't. His wording was calculated.

The public understood immediately that this was a political action; 70% of those polled said it was political, which is a virtual landslide when people are asked politically-loaded questions. But the press didn't; on a slow news cycle, they pretty much decided to play it like it was a big deal.

The end result is that everyone -- the pres, congress, reporters, the public -- took time out to address this as if it was a scandal. And THAT, in turn, means that all the eyes were off the prize: the CONTINING THREAT. Because while the last attack can't be prevented, the next one might be, and introducing partisan politics and fake scandal is not really a good way to address that one.

[Nic Name]

Why is it that politicians, once in power, complain about their opponents having a political agenda and acting partisan?

In fact, isn't acting politically the behavior that got them elected. And isn't the American system of government what we're all fighting for?

And, why do the politically motivated say that the people in the other party are idiots. The word idiot must derive from ideology.

There so many idiots in politics, apparently, if you listen to politicians. Let's not delude ourselves that our politicians are elected on merit. That's appointment, not election. If the President were elected by the Supreme Court, for instance, we could expect a non-political appointment. Well, if the Supreme Court Justices weren't political appointments.

It is well established in American politics that any idiot can be president ... well, maybe not just any idiot.

President Bush's funny joke at the Yale commencement:

"And to the C students, I say, you, too can be president of the United States."

All joking aside, Kinsley says,

Sure, a C student can become president. It helps if his father was president first and his grandfather was a senator and he was born into a family that straddles the Northeast WASP aristocracy and the Sun Belt business establishment. And a C student at prep school can get into Yale by adopting a similar action plan of strategic birth control. (That is, controlling whom you're born to.)

OK, brilliant men differ, according to their political party allegiance, whether Bush is really an idiot. By definition of president, he's the right idiot in the right place at the right time. In any event, he's our (sic) idiot in Chief. So, let's all forget about politics, until after the next presidential election, and focus on what a great job Bush is doing to defend the free world.

Questioning who knew what when, or investigating what lead up to the attack on 9/11 is irrelevant to preventing the next attack. Anyone who believes that is either an idiot or a Republican.

Politically speaking, it's still OK to speak politically about how the war on terrorism is being fought, if you are praising the administration or raising funds for the GOP. But if you're a Democrat, or some other liberal idiot, just watch what you say.

What's wrong with having a political agenda? Bush is a politician. Anyone who thinks he's got his personal political ambitions on hold while he focuses on the war on terror is a political neophyte, or doyen. Bush is such a genius he can focus on his political agenda and lead the war on terror, but Daschle is an idiot. I don't know much about him, personally, and he may be a lot of things, but I doubt that idiot is one of them.

On the other hand, he could be an idiot who gets elected President of the United States. It's always someone. That's politics.

[elSicomoro]

Yeah, we know that the Democrats are salivating at the moment...looking to steal any thunder from Dubya's Feel Good Ride. They're desperate at the moment, and I don't like the fact that they're pouncing on this so quickly. Hindsight is 20/20, and it would be easy to say now that this could have been prevented. Could it have? Possibly, but IMO unlikely. By the same token, I think if the Dems were currently in power, the Republicans probably would have done the same thing. It's all about politics, baby!

I generally can't stand the Rev. Al Sharpton, but he made a good point on Hardball last night: We need to know everything that happened before we jump to any conclusions.

The publicity in the past few days is what has really scared me. What I don't like is that it SEEMS TO ME like the White House is trying to stress that it's wrong to question the administration. I think Dubya overall has done a good job in handling the entire 9/11 aftermath, along with his administration. But even if Dubya's hands are clean on this (and I'd say that they probably are), I'm not THAT confident in the leadership to the point where I would trust them blindly.

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Nothing But Net
Not really, but I did call him and the rest of the Dem's a bunch of idiots in the 5th largest circ paper in the US

Unless there has been a massive surge of readers since the Enron scandal, Infoplease ranks the Chronicle at number 9 as of 9/30/01. And I don't see it beating out heavyweights like the Chicago Tribune or Washington Post to get in the top 5.