Do As He Says, Not As He's Done
Kerry’s grandstanding about the 9/11 committee recommendations last Friday is awfully ironic, isn’t it?
Isn’t this the same guy who takes forever to muse and ponder and reflect and agonize about policy decisions? Isn’t this the same wonk that pedantically studies every “nuance” of every issue from every angle so that he can take any position he needs to consistent with the latest political conditions? Isn’t this the same laggard legislator who, in eight years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, missed over three-quarters of its meetings? And isn’t this the same presidential candidate that, when being overrun by the Howie Dean phenomenon, described the fourteen-month crawl toward Operation Iraqi Freedom as “as rush to war”?
And now he knocks Bush and his national security team for taking a few days to actually read the Committee’s 567-page report?
Oh, sure, it was another attempt – lame and clumsy, as always – to score points off of Bush’s national security advantage. But it’s an obsolete angle. Bush is open to legit criticism for taking no steps to reform the sprawling intelligence apparatus since the 9/11 attacks, just like he took heat for dragging his feet on creating the 9/11 commission in the first place. But he did create it, and it made its recommendations, and after reviewing them, the White House is beginning the process of implementing most of them, in particular a overall intelligence overseer/coordinator and a national center to plan counter-terror operations. If the President had blown off the Commission – which would have been eminently understandable given how its Dem contingent discredited it by using its public deliberations to defame him and his national security team – Kerry might have some ground on which to stand with this gambit. As it is, it just makes him look like he’s horning in on serious policymaking to try and make himself look relevant. Which, of course, only highlights his lack of credibility on national security issues.
This is a man who simply does not know how to pick his spots.
And his is a campaign that apparently does not know how to send consistent messages, or so I judge from Dr. Demented’s latest flight of paranoia over last week’s averted al Qaeda strikes in New York’s financial district: “I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
Guess his medication from last week ran out. al-Jazeera couldn’t have said it better themselves.
I guess if the Bushies don’t issue public terror alerts, and there’s another attack, they’re criminally negligent; but if they do, that automatically means that there is no threat because they’re sounding the alarm. Kind of like how the President wrongly “rushed to war” to pre-empt Saddam Hussein, but was wrongly “asleep at the switch” in not pre-empting al Qaeda and the Taliban before 9/11. Heads they win, tails Bush loses.
Even though I know that Dean is almost certainly sincere in this madness, it’s still difficult not to wonder whether he’s just working the media on this flap. Can it really not even occur to him that perhaps Secretary Ridge is simply doing precisely what it looks like – issuing a specific terror alert based upon relevant and persuasive information?
Or maybe Dean was just trying to offer a different excuse for Kerry’s no-bounce convention flop. Besides, if the Bushies were given to manipulating terror alerts for political gain, would they have spent the last year and a quarter letting their opponents batter them unconscious unanswered and unopposed? Almost makes me wish it were true – Bush would probably be up twenty points by now and we wouldn’t have to put up with this crap.
The Kerry camp wasted little time publicly distancing themselves from Dean’s charges. The operative word, of course, being publicly. Nobody can convince me that they don’t privately approve of what Dean is doing. It’s classic triangulation – let the “bad cop” (Dean) cast the opponent (Bush) as his de facto opposite, with Kerry free to float above it all in the noble center. Which, of course, was stepped all over by Kerry’s own antics, and by the sheepish concession by the partisan press – which had run with the Dem-supplied angle that Secretary Ridge’s intelligence was “years old” – that some of that intelligence was collected within the past week or two. As if the freshness of the intel is somehow a trump card – the 9/11 attacks were five years in the launching, after all.
What is the lasting impression that comes out of this? Precisely the one Kerry doesn’t want – that he and his party are the ones politicizing national security, and reinforcing why they cannot be trusted with stewardship of it. Not unlike Teraaaaaaaayza’s “shove it” quip was the effective slogan of the Boston convention.
And to think there’s ninety more days of this to go.
Isn’t this the same guy who takes forever to muse and ponder and reflect and agonize about policy decisions? Isn’t this the same wonk that pedantically studies every “nuance” of every issue from every angle so that he can take any position he needs to consistent with the latest political conditions? Isn’t this the same laggard legislator who, in eight years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, missed over three-quarters of its meetings? And isn’t this the same presidential candidate that, when being overrun by the Howie Dean phenomenon, described the fourteen-month crawl toward Operation Iraqi Freedom as “as rush to war”?
And now he knocks Bush and his national security team for taking a few days to actually read the Committee’s 567-page report?
Oh, sure, it was another attempt – lame and clumsy, as always – to score points off of Bush’s national security advantage. But it’s an obsolete angle. Bush is open to legit criticism for taking no steps to reform the sprawling intelligence apparatus since the 9/11 attacks, just like he took heat for dragging his feet on creating the 9/11 commission in the first place. But he did create it, and it made its recommendations, and after reviewing them, the White House is beginning the process of implementing most of them, in particular a overall intelligence overseer/coordinator and a national center to plan counter-terror operations. If the President had blown off the Commission – which would have been eminently understandable given how its Dem contingent discredited it by using its public deliberations to defame him and his national security team – Kerry might have some ground on which to stand with this gambit. As it is, it just makes him look like he’s horning in on serious policymaking to try and make himself look relevant. Which, of course, only highlights his lack of credibility on national security issues.
This is a man who simply does not know how to pick his spots.
And his is a campaign that apparently does not know how to send consistent messages, or so I judge from Dr. Demented’s latest flight of paranoia over last week’s averted al Qaeda strikes in New York’s financial district: “I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
Guess his medication from last week ran out. al-Jazeera couldn’t have said it better themselves.
I guess if the Bushies don’t issue public terror alerts, and there’s another attack, they’re criminally negligent; but if they do, that automatically means that there is no threat because they’re sounding the alarm. Kind of like how the President wrongly “rushed to war” to pre-empt Saddam Hussein, but was wrongly “asleep at the switch” in not pre-empting al Qaeda and the Taliban before 9/11. Heads they win, tails Bush loses.
Even though I know that Dean is almost certainly sincere in this madness, it’s still difficult not to wonder whether he’s just working the media on this flap. Can it really not even occur to him that perhaps Secretary Ridge is simply doing precisely what it looks like – issuing a specific terror alert based upon relevant and persuasive information?
Or maybe Dean was just trying to offer a different excuse for Kerry’s no-bounce convention flop. Besides, if the Bushies were given to manipulating terror alerts for political gain, would they have spent the last year and a quarter letting their opponents batter them unconscious unanswered and unopposed? Almost makes me wish it were true – Bush would probably be up twenty points by now and we wouldn’t have to put up with this crap.
The Kerry camp wasted little time publicly distancing themselves from Dean’s charges. The operative word, of course, being publicly. Nobody can convince me that they don’t privately approve of what Dean is doing. It’s classic triangulation – let the “bad cop” (Dean) cast the opponent (Bush) as his de facto opposite, with Kerry free to float above it all in the noble center. Which, of course, was stepped all over by Kerry’s own antics, and by the sheepish concession by the partisan press – which had run with the Dem-supplied angle that Secretary Ridge’s intelligence was “years old” – that some of that intelligence was collected within the past week or two. As if the freshness of the intel is somehow a trump card – the 9/11 attacks were five years in the launching, after all.
What is the lasting impression that comes out of this? Precisely the one Kerry doesn’t want – that he and his party are the ones politicizing national security, and reinforcing why they cannot be trusted with stewardship of it. Not unlike Teraaaaaaaayza’s “shove it” quip was the effective slogan of the Boston convention.
And to think there’s ninety more days of this to go.
posted by JASmius at 3:43 PM
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