July 27, 2004

The Great Farce

There's a superb op-ed piece by Richard Cohen in today's Washington Post. It addresses the sad fact that despite the biggest intelligence failures of our generation -- 9/11 and the total absence of the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq -- the Bush Administration has changed little except its rhetoric.

Cohen observes that Pres. Bush said recently he wants to move "quickly" to implement the 9/11 Commission's recommendations (even though he opposed it's creation), while he could have done all of this stuff already. So "it takes a New York kind of chutzpah for Bush to suddenly announce he will do what he has put off doing for lo these past three years. In that time the president steadfastly stood by his team of jolly incompetents," like George Tenet at CIA, who was kept on "even after he had assured Bush that it was a 'slam-dunk' that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction."

The best part is his conclusion. Cohen writes, from the Democratic National Convention in Boston:

Now we are engaged in a great farce. Outside my hotel room, a good piece of the nation's political talent is engaged in a purposeless convention to nominate a man who has already been nominated. And down in Crawford, the White House staff is dutifully feeding the press accounts of Bush's newfound concern about what ails the intelligence community and even -- imagine! -- that Bush took the Sept. 11 commission's report with him.

Touche!

 Posted by glenn

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