Tom Ridge Confirms a Shameful Truth

At first I was far from shocked at the news that former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says he was pressured by two Bush administration cabinet members to raise the government terror alert level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. After all, it seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the color-coded system was being manipulated for political purposes. Whenever things started to look bleak for the White House and the Republican party, presto, we went from Yellow to Orange. Ridge, Cheney or Bush started talking about "chatter" and "specific threats" and everyone fell back into line (perhaps the know-nothings parroting Hannity and Beck's ridiculous talking points about Obama's supposed totalitarian tactics at the health care town hall meetings should consider the real and proven totalitarian tendencies of their own party, but I digress).

And, truth be told, I'd rather focus on the present and the future than get caught up in past battles. But the more I see the headlines today and really think about what happened, the angrier I get.

That's because no matter how many different angles I employ to analyze the situation, I can't help but come to the same conclusion: Bush, Cheney and the GOP not only badly mishandled 9/11 and its aftermath, but added insult to injury by shamelessly exploiting the horrific deaths of 3,000 people for their own grubby political gains.

First and foremost — and a fact that seems to constantly get lost in this debate — Bush knew what was coming and failed to stop it. Eight years ago, in August 2001, he began his day with a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The briefing went into detail about Al Qaeda wanting to hijack commercial aircraft to attack US targets. The CIA and FBI were standing on second base stealing the catcher's signs, telling the president to expect the fastball. But instead of taking a swing, Bush and Cheney struck out looking. That's a fact.

So how did they redeem themselves? Instead of focusing all of our military and diplomatic efforts on finishing the job of finding Osama bin Laden and crushing Al Qaeda where it was headquartered — in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, which, despite being one of many reprehensible totalitarian regimes in the world at that time, had nothing to do with 9/11 and was not a state sponsor of Al Qaeda.

And instead of doing everything possible to protect the homeland from further attacks, the government under Bush and Cheney diverted millions in Homeland Security funds to protect tiny towns in Kentucky and other rural, Republican, Christian strongholds that should have been fortifying actual terrorist targets in godless, Democratic New York and other big cities. As a result, our ports, chemical plants and nuclear power plants lack the protection they need. My family and millions of others are at risk because of this. That makes me very, very angry. With real anger, not the faux froth that Republican operatives posing as ordinary citizens are using to quash reasoned communication and debate at health care town hall meetings.

Indeed, the examples I cite here are all facts, not fake, outrageous rhetoric that gets dreamed up at RNC headquarters and parroted to an anxious country by the reprehensible, hateful little maggots at Fox News for the purpose of stirring up anger and resentment for political purposes (and for rating$, let's not forget). Click the links in each of the above examples and read for yourself (or don't, if you'd rather just believe what you want to believe).

I'm not normally given to angry rants. But I was in New York City on 9/11. I knew people who perished in the World Trade Center. Other friends and business associates narrowly escaped. I watched one of the buildings collapse with my own eyes. I lived close enough to Ground Zero to see the smoke rising from the site and inhale the sickening smell of death for weeks following the attack. It took about a year before I could see a shabby-looking guy wearing a backpack on the subway without my pulse quickening and my stomach getting a bit queasy. And to this day, eight years later, I still commute to New York City. And I still wonder what's going on behind the scenes when, on some days, the cops at the PATH station or on the streets of the financial district are suddenly brandishing assault rifles, or national guardsmen turn up, when they weren't the day before.

It was bad enough for all these years to see and hear 9/11 constantly invoked as a political weapon by the very people who so badly mishandled the attacks and their aftermath. And I can only imagine how the families of 9/11 victims felt. But now I know for a fact that my president and his minions shamefully exploited our sorrow — and exacerbated our fear with their public warnings — with no basis other than their own grubby desire to remain in power.

How could they? And followers of Christ, these people? Where was their sense of basic human decency? Shame, shame, shame.

There Sarah Goes Again - Makin' Things Up

I promised not to let another three months go by without posting, and I am hereby keeping my word — even if I'm doing it with a bit of fudging. Truth is I've been far too busy to post regularly but I did just read something that could very well have been a post on Citizen. It's Timothy Egan's New York Times piece on the health-care-demagoguery hoo-ha. So I'll link to it here, paste the content below (with certain passages nearest and dearest to my heart in bold) and let him do the work for me. Thank you, Mr. Egan!

August 9, 2009, 11:24 PM

Palin’s Poison

In Egypt, 43 percent of people think Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks in America, a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found last year.

In the United States, six percent of Americans say the moon landing of 40 years ago was staged, according to Gallup.

And in Alaska, the former governor, a woman who was nearly a heartbeat away from the presidency, now tells followers that “Obama death panels” could decide if her parents and her baby, Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, will live or die.

The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories. But now, with the light-speed and reach of the Web, “entire virtual crank communities,” as the conservative writer David Frum called them, have sprung up. They are fed, in the case of Sarah Palin, by people who should know better.

For a democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry to balance a permanent lobbying class, this is poison. And it’s one reason why town hall forums on health care, which should be sharp debates about something that affects all of us, have turned into town mauls.

The lies and shouts have had the effect that all crank speech has on free speech — stifling any real exchange. In my state, Representative Brian Baird, a veteran of more than 300 town hall meetings during his 11 years as a Democratic congressman from southwest Washington, has decided not to hold any such forums this recess after receiving death threats.

But is it any wonder that some are moved to violent threats, given the level of misinformation being injected into the system? If you really believed that Obama was going to kill your baby and euthanize your parents, well — why not act in self defense?

Here’s what Palin said on her Facebook page Friday, in her first online comments since quitting as Alaska governor.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

This is pure fantasy, fact-free almost in its entirety. The nonpartisan group FactCheck.org said there was no basis for such a claim in any of the health care bills under consideration in Congress. One House bill would pay for counseling for terminally ill patients — something anyone who has lost an elderly loved one of late, as I have, will find essential.

Palin was given some cover Sunday by the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a master of slipping innuendo into his arguments. Defending the “death panel” post on ABC’s “This Week,” Gingrich said, “you’re asking us to trust the government.” By such reasoning, American foreign policy is not worth its word, the currency is worthless, and the moon landing was indeed a fake.

The last time Gingrich went so far was when he called Justice Sonia Sotomayor a racist. He retracted it then. We’ll see what he does now. As for Palin, she should follow her own advice to the media of a few weeks ago — lay off the kids and “quit makin’ things up.”