Presidential Ineptitude

Wow.

Looks like 60 Minutes will be Must See TV tonight.

Check this out.

Bush ignored warnings in the months leading up to September 11th. The White House wanted to pin the World Trade Center attacks on Iraq, viewing Al Quaeda as small potatoes. Clinton, by contrast, given similar warnings of an imminent terrorist threat in 1999, ordered his security advisors and intelligence apparatus to battlestations, and as a result, an Al Quaeda operative with plans to bomb LAX was stopped trying to cross the Canadian border with a car load of explosives.

Are these charges made by some powerless, partisan lefty member of Congress?

Nope.

They're being made by a man who served as the first President Bush's top terrorism expert, who was kept on in the Clinton White House, and stayed to serve the former Governor of Texas, but saw his job ('terrorism czar') down-graded from being a Cabinet-level position after the innauguration.

It's always tough to tell in politics how these things will play out. No doubt Karl Rove has but to reach over and pull his file filled with all the dirt on this guy and get it into circulation before the cridibility will be questioned. And chances are, they've known or suspected for weeks that this was coming and they're all ready with a counter-offensive.

But, I find it weirdly reminiscent of learning that the Office of the Independent Counsel was questioning a former White House intern who may have had a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. Only the issue there was what the President did with his penis, not gross and catastrophic mismanagement of national security.

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