Monday, August 16, 2004

Those 7 minutes

Anyone who pays attention to the political discourse in this country probably has that 1 talking head personality in whom they most identify. For me that person is Bill Maher. Not that I identify with being a rich, middle-age, famous Jewish television personality, rather I find myself agreeing with about 90% of the opinions he spews forth.

That said, I have to take issue with his op-ed column from August 12 that was printed in the New York Daily News. In it, he repeats the mantra about how Bush froze and wasted precious minutes after he learned that we were under attack on 9/11. Am I the only non-neoconservative who doesn’t think a big deal should be made about the 7 minutes (plus 20 more tooling around in the school lobby) that Bush wasted? Granted, it doesn’t make him look good, and the excuses made by the right-wing-nuts are feeble at best. But on the list of reasons to dump Bush and his cronies, this ranks about #42 or so.

Why don’t I think this is a big deal? First, I don’t think Bush was in charge anyway. Sure, his handlers tossed him the occasional bone by allowing him to put forward his pet projects such as the ‘no child left behind act,’ his ‘faith-based initiatives,’ and the now long forgotten ‘amnesty for illegal immigrants’ proposal. But Bush was never in charge of the ‘important’ stuff such as foreign policy, economic policy, or national security. Those were the domain of Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. By all accounts, Bush wasn’t even interested in those aspects of government prior to 9/11, so it’s not surprising to me that he had no reaction to the attacks. He was probably sitting there thinking, “I hope Dick (Cheney) knows what to do.”

Second, what could he have done at that point anyway? Once an attack is underway, and from all accounts it was pretty much over with at that point, it's too late to do anything about it. The real crime happened in the months leading up to the attack. Clearly we had some intelligence that this type of attack was underfoot. The problem is that they didn’t act on the information in July and August. Contingency plans should have been in place long before those planes took off. If you have to come up with a plan in the moment, then it’s too late.

Anyway, there are so many more fruitful trees that the leftists could be barking up. This one just doesn’t bear fruit. I realize that this issue plays on emotions and is being used simply as a tactic to counter the Bush argument that he is a stronger leader than Kerry. But maybe we should talk about the 1.4 million jobs that have been lost. Maybe we should talk about the thousands of lives lost fighting a mythical enemy. Maybe we should talk about the failure to kill or capture major Al Qaida leaders 3 years after the fact.

posted by bkopec @ 4:31 PM   3 comments