He Kept Us Safe (Except When He Didn't)

I'm really sick to death of hearing
the Bush administration people brag about how they kept us safe from
terrorists, matrimonially inclined homosexuals, and other really mean
people.

Sure, I understand why they do it.
And, no, I'm not referring to the fact that regressives seem to be
congenital liars, or that, because they themselves are so existentially
frightened, they understand instinctively just how the politics of fear
work.

No doubt all of that is part of the equation.
But I think the bigger reason that we are continually exposed to this
insane mantra is because, despite their delusional tendencies, even
conservatives recognize the paucity of plausible alternative claims.

I mean, would you want to go to the public
bragging about having booted two wars, one based entirely on lies, and
both strung out now about twice the length of America's involvement
in World War II? Would you run for office touting your party's
achievements at doubling the size of the national debt? Would
you point to Hurricane Katrina and say "Heckuva job, Bushie", expecting
the public to agree?

The truth is that, yes, regressives almost
always lie, and, yes, they love to play the politics of fear, but the
key reason that they brag about having kept the country safe during
the Bush years is because it's the only claim they can plausibly make
without being laughed out of the room.

In fact, though, they should be laughed
out of the room for making what is in reality the most absurd claim
of all. And then they should consider themselves damn lucky only
to be laughed at.

Disingenuous regressives (and what other
kind are there?) who try to sell you on this notion want you to believe
that the Bush administration somehow began on September 12, 2001.
They love to tell you about how the country was protected from terrorist
attack after 9/11. But that's odd, isn't it? I always
thought the job of the president was to protect the country for the
entire length of his administration, not just nine-tenths of it.

It gets even odder still if you inject
a little bit of logic into dissecting their argument, always a hugely
dangerous enterprise from the perspective of regressive mythology.
That is, let's just take them for a moment on their own terms, for
the sake of argument. We're supposed to be impressed that George
W. Bush kept the country safe from major terrorist attack. But
of his forty-two predecessors in the Oval Office, can you think of any
single one who failed to meet that test? Me neither.

Indeed, only one president experienced
a major foreign terrorist attack on his watch over the two and a quarter
centuries the United States has existed. His name was Bush, George
W. Somehow, they don't mention that part. Of course, the
joys of having conservatives around have always included the pleasure
of hearing lies to cover truth, bluster to mask fear, and arrogance
bluffing for insecurity. Likewise, the folks running hither and
yon squawking about how they kept us safe are actually the only ones
in the entire history of this country who, simply, did not. Did.
Not.

Yet, in fact, this is only the beginning
of the crime (and I won't even comment on the many strands of compelling
evidence suggesting that some or all of the official 9/11 story is a
fabrication). When I say that George W. Bush is the only president
to have "experienced" a major terrorist attack on his watch, that
is the most charitable possible reading of events. Even if one
does manage to intrude upon regressive hallucinations by pointing out
that, uh sorry, it wasn't Jimmy Carter who was president of the United
States on 9/11, any regressive worthy of his stripes will demonstrate
great umbrage at the suggestion that Bush might have prevented that
day's attacks.

And, you know, personally, I suspect
that blocking secretly-planned terrorist strikes is pretty tricky business,
even for the best of governments at the top of their game. And
so, ordinarily I'd be inclined to cut any president some serious slack
on this question, assuming there was a competent team making its best
efforts at the admittedly difficult project of swatting flies in the
dark, with the necessity of getting them all.

And it is precisely this widely held
sense of fair play upon which regressives prey when they implicitly
exonerate the Bush administration for the failure of 9/11. But
there are two crucial flaws to this unstated (because it is never challenged,
and therefore doesn't need to be spoken) line of thought, and they
are in fact monstrous in both scope and effect.

The first is the notion - generally
implicit, but sometimes stated by people like Condoleezza Rice - that
nobody could have seen this sort of attack coming. She, for example,
has noted that when one used to think of terrorist airplane hijackings,
those scenarios involved simply flying the plane to Cuba or some such
place and demanding a ransom. Leave aside that some security officials
did, in fact, game out precisely the possibility of hijacking airplanes
and crashing them into buildings. And leave aside the odd twist
of logic that this approach entails, suggesting that mere 'regular'
hijackings would be acceptable and unnecessary to guard against.

Even apart from all that, what is so
galling about this lame defense is that it comes from the very same
people who consistently criticized the Clinton administration for supposedly
being weak on terrorism. In fact, Richard Clarke, who served both
presidents, in addition to Bush's father and Ronald Reagan, has indicated
emphatically - despite the fact that he's a Republican who voted
for Bush in 2000 - that Clinton was far more serious about combating
terrorism than his successor was.

It's well beyond outrageous for regressives
to simultaneously attack the Clinton administration for its failures
at preempting terrorist attacks - against the World Trade Center,
against the USS Cole, against American embassies in Africa - and yet
fully exonerate Bush, heroically even, for 9/11. Unless I'm
reading my history book upside down again (as I am sometimes wont to
do 'cause it makes so much more sense that way), the Bush administration
came after Clinton. They had no excuse for being less vigilant
against an Al Qaeda attack, especially given their fondness for labeling
Clinton as weak on terrorism.

But the second implicit logic underlying
the exoneration of the Bush administration for 9/11 is even more gratuitous.
It's the unspoken presumption that the administration did everything
it could and simply couldn't prevent the attack any more than all
the will and all the effort in the world could stop a tsunami coursing
across the ocean from reaching its destination.

But here's what Clarke said in 2004,
and it's important to remember that he was not some off-the-pigs-counterculture-beret-wearing-dope-smoking-stuck-forever-in-1968-radical-Mao-spouting-militant,
but, rather, the very man that George W. Bush hired to head his anti-terrorism
efforts: "Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is
running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things
about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for
months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.
Maybe. We'll never know. I think he's done a terrible job
on the war against terrorism."

Clarke had good reasons to say these
things, too. He had tried in vain for eight months to get a meeting
of top Bush administration officials on the question of terrorism and
the Al Qaeda threat. Nobody would take the matter seriously.
He finally got his meeting, but it was one week prior to 9/11, and the
administration still had little interest in terrorism, because it was
already entirely focused on Iraq. His meeting got hijacked, so
to speak.

The myth of basic Bush administration
competence in fighting terrorism is similarly shattered by George Tenet's
efforts of a similar nature. The CIA director was also hearing
alarm bells going off like crazy in the weeks before 9/11. Unable
to shake the administration out of its stupor, Tenet finally resorted
to calling an emergency meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice. He still could not manage to move the Bush team into action.
She wasn't interested.

And then there's the president himself.
He was famously briefed on August 6, 2001, one month before the attack,
with an urgent report entitled, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In
US". Bush was in Crawford, Texas, chainsawing brush, pretending
to be a Texan, and playing cowboys and Indians. What was his reaction
to this seven alarm emergency? This president - who, by the
way, spent more time on vacation than any other American president in
history - remained on vacation for an entire month prior to 9/11.

Even more telling was Bush's immediate
reaction to this briefing. He telegraphed his level of concern
by responding to the CIA briefer who presented him with the report using
these infamous words: "All right. You've covered your
ass, now."

Unless one lives with Alice, the Mad
Hatter and the Queen of Hearts in some sort of LSD-soaked Wonderland
- which I'm increasingly convinced all regressives in fact do -
it's impossible to reconcile these historical facts with any plausible
argument that the Bush administration was competent, or even seriously
concerned, about fighting terrorism. If there is any doubt about
this whatsoever, just try replacing the name Bush in these stories with
Obama. The lunatics on the right are literally already calling
Obama a socialist, communist, and fascist, while worrying out loud about
his secret plan to turn America into a Muslim paradise. Imagine
what they would say about him if his top terrorism advisor and his CIA
director warned him of a looming attack, he responded to that warning
by accusing them of bureaucratic ass-covering and by spending the next
month on vacation, and then 3000 Americans died in an attack he failed
to take seriously.

Given what they already say about Obama,
or Clinton, and given a repeat of these same set of facts that actually
do apply to George Bush, I could quite literally imagine a massive,
angry and violent march on Washington - think tea parties on steroids,
complete with roid rage - in which the president's life would literally
be in danger. And you know what? People should be incredibly
angry at any president so incompetent, so negligent, and so cavalier.

But, of course, George Bush's job approval
ratings only skyrocketed in the wake of 9/11, and he remains a favorite
of regressives unto this day, who also miraculously completely buy into
the myth of George the Protector, the guy who kept us safe (except when
he didn't). So much so that even the former vice president could
wait only a week or two into the new administration to begin lining
up the predicate for blame should the United States experience another
terrorist attack during the Obama administration.

In the end, all of this is powerful testament
to the skill regressives possess at bludgeoning and marketing.
Even middle Americans, who long ago migrated from supporting George
Bush out of fear to despising the little puke for all the manifold and
righteous reasons there are to choose from, still buy into the myth
that Bush kept us safe. Nobody ever blames him for 9/11, despite
the fact that there is ample evidence overwhelmingly demonstrating his
administration's complete failure leading up to that day.

And, miraculously, nobody thinks of him
with any sort of historical accuracy on this question. Not only
is he not the president who kept us safe, he is indeed precisely the
opposite. He is the one president - out of forty-four, serving
for over two centuries time - on whose watch a massive terrorist attack
took place.

Even as Barack Obama endears himself
to America by returning the careening, hurtling eighteen wheeler to
the middle-of-the-road - right there with Jim Hightower's proverbial
yellow stripes and dead armadillos - and even as the Republican Party
finds new ways each week to commit political suicide by increment, attitudes
on this question still remains nothing short of astonishing.

Those among us - including tens of
millions who voted for Bush not just once, but twice - wishing to
dismiss the last eight years as some sort of aberrant nightmare should
stop for a long moment to consider the meaning of Bush administration
mythology on the question of terrorism and national security.

Maybe it's true that regressive freaks
can no longer plausibly run around bragging about how great the boy
king was on economics, or fighting bad guys abroad. Woo-hoo.
Yep, we've come a long way, for sure.

But surely it is a measure of this society's
profoundly pathetic and unyielding political immaturity that these lunatics
can still get away with lauding the former president with the monumental
claim of keeping America safe, when in fact he did just the opposite.

What kind of country is it where so manifestly
absurd and oxymoronic a line as that goes unchallenged?