When the history of our time is written, American society will be remembered less for materialism than for its incredibly short attention span. As a culture, we lurch from trend to trend and scandal to scandal to scandal with almost no consciousness of what happened last month or last year, and even less of what happened a decade or generation ago.

Take, for instance, the September 11 foresight scandal. For a few weeks in May and early June, the front pages of ever major newspaper carried chilling accounts of high-level terrorism warnings ignored, with determined nonchalance, by President Bush and his administration. These warnings were not "noise" or "chatter," as administration apologists like to call them. Among them was an intelligence summary given to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice on June 28 of last year, which stated "it is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks." A week later, just a month and a day before President Bush's briefly infamous briefing on possible al Qaeda hijackings, Richard Clarke -- the government's top counterterrorism official -- warned that "something spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon."

President Bush, confronted with these dire predictions, decided to take a "working vacation" in Texas. "I knew [Osama bin Laden] was a menace and I knew he was a problem," Bush later said. "But I didn't feel that sense of urgency."

However, President Bush certainly felt a sense of urgency when faced with allegations of negligence. After news of the August 6 briefing went public, the administration was quick to label questions as "incendiary," and insisted it was unthinkable that September 11 could have been foreseen or prevented. Soon afterwards they admitted that it was quite thinkable, and made a tactical decision to abandon confrontational rhetoric and encourage a limited inquiry into intelligence mistakes.

By shifting attention from its own possible failures to those of the intelligence community, the Bush administration was able to transform the debate. FBI Director Robert Mueller, who took office on September 5 after Bush left the position filled on an interim basis all summer, was paraded before the media as a decoy and scapegoat. Shortly afterwards, an investigation was formally convened -- not an independent commission, as many had called for, but a Congressional inquiry to be held in secret. Co-chairing the investigation is Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican and former CIA footman. His description of the first meeting set a disturbingly convivial, back-slapping tone: "The mood was very positive, and refreshing, especially in comparison to the finger pointing that is going on in other circles."

The loyal opposition, both Congressionally and in the body politic, accepted this half-measure with a minimum of struggle, electing instead to concentrate on capturing the House in the November elections. At the time it was a very risky strategy, conceding much at a critical moment. But now that corporations are dropping like flies, with the economy victim to fraud of epic proportions, things are looking grim for Republicans, who have always been the party of Big Business and have as their leader a President who promised to run the country like a corporation.

All of a sudden, the Teflon coating which shielded Bush from a mind-blowing succession of scandals -- any of which would have sunk most Presidents -- appears to be wearing thin. The election coup, secret energy policies, a budget surplus turned overnight into deficits, flagrant links to Enron, gross incompetence in the Middle East, an about-face on global warming -- on all these issues, Americans who bothered to pay attention at all were basically content to accept administration rhetoric as truth. But the economy is a different matter.

According to a July 20 Newsweek poll, President Bush's approval ratings have fallen to 66%, their lowest level since September 10. Fewer than fifty percent of Americans "are satisfied with the way things are going in general." As conservative writer Christopher Caldwell wrote in a scathing New York Press article, "What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically . . . is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having 'earned' a fortune . . . without ever having done an honest day's work in his life."

When your own supporters start talking like that, it's time to worry. It's also time for the loyal opposition to take a stand -- and how better to do so than by finally challenging John Ashcroft, that ultimate bogeyman of both liberals and traditional conservatives, who until now has been protected by Bush's aura of impenetrability?

The case for Ashcroft's removal could be easily made with information already documented. His negligence before September 11 is a matter of public record -- rejecting increased funding for counterterrorism, proposing cuts for state and local counterterrorist programs, and ignoring an internal report detailing the near-complete unpreparedness of the FBI for terrorist attacks that were already viewed as imminent. The solutions he has championed since then, particularly the deregulation of the FBI, are not just violations of Constitutional rights. They are demonstrably unrelated to winning the War on Terrorism.

Dismay with Ashcroft is spreading even on the right. Grover Norquist, a conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, claims that Ashcroft's "religious base is now quite troubled by what he's done." House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican, recently rejected the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), an Ashcroft brainchild that would have enlisted 24 million Americans to act as federal informants, empowered under the Patriot Act to investigate and report any "suspicious" behavior.

There is ample reason to believe that John Ashcroft's continued service is not in America's best interest, and it is imperative to make the case now, before momentum is lost, and before the Bush administration manages to force through its deeply flawed plans for a Department of Homeland Security. For all that the crashing economy and Bush's corporate links appear to weaken the President, he has proved enormously resourceful. That America might soon return its natural sleepwalking state, albeit with smaller bank accounts and heightened retirement worries, is depressingly likely.

Though the September 11 scandal has been compared to Watergate, it seems destined to end up like the Iran-Contra affair. Despite having sold weapons to our enemies, and channeling the funds to Nicaraguan death squads, many of the perpetrators went on to political prominence; and Ronald Reagan, under whose watch it all happened, has been deified by the revisionist right.

The Bush administration may resist public demands that it learn from mistakes made with America's safety, but it will certainly not fail to learn from its own mistakes in scandal management. The loyal opposition must act now. In the year 2002, Richard Nixon would not be impeached.

Brandon Keim is the Editor of GeneWatch E-mail: brandonkeim@mindspring.com / www.djinnetic.org/blog

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