SmithAntics

Hello again, from Arcata, California, where progressive politics are alive and well.

This is a town in which open dissent against BushCo is displayed by the town's residents and its political leadership. What a novel concept!

Yes, green is not only the color of this area's most beloved "produce" (as commenter Lisa described it), it's also the color of its political consciousness.

Why the hell did I leave this place?

Anyway, onto the 9/11 Commission report--er, politically concocted whitewash job.

What a bombshell, eh?

Once again, BushCo gets a free pass under the guise of "bipartisanship," which is really just code for a sustained and systematic coverup of this massively corrupt and criminally incompetent administration and its allies. When will we escape this alternate reality? Almost four years of this shit. What a tragic waste. Make it stop!

Regular Altercation reader Charles Pierce nails it.

So, it was the acronyms who did it.

CIA, FBI, NSC, but not the NSA, God knows. DOT. DoD. The acronyms did it. Fire all the acronyms.

I don't know at what point my head exploded. Maybe it was when Tom Kean was complimenting Bill O'Reilly on the latter's analytical abilities, or when Condi Rice was waxing all serious with Sean Hannity. Maybe it was earlier, when Lee Hamilton suggested that nobody was reading enough Tom Clancy. (After yesterday, and given the dive he took 20 years ago on Iran-Contra, Hamilton is now the Greg Louganis of the national security state.) I mean, Christ's sweet name, a failure of imagination? Not on the part of Gary Hart or Warren Rudman or Al Gore, or Coleen Rowley, or the people in Phoenix, or poor, dead John O'Neill. Their imaginations didn't fail. In fact, the single most preposterous part of yesterday's report was its tsk-tsking of how the recommendations of previous commissions were ignored. Who ignored them?

Nobody.

It was the acronyms.

Everybody's guilty so nobody is.

Read the footnotes, and remember, every time a conversation with either George Bush or Dick Cheney is cited, that this testimony was not given under oath, and under circumstances that were flatly bizarre, and that the testimony was given by two men who fought hard against the very existence of the commission, especially the former, who has made no mistake that he can recall, and is not specifically contradicted in any way by this report. Instead, it was an exercise designed -- as was the Tower Commission before it -- to reassure us that the problem is in structural institutional details, and not in the men tasked to do great deeds for us so that we don't strain ourselves in the exercise of self-government. (To his everlasting credit, Bob Kerrey seemed to be rather pissed on this very point.)

I, for one, completely trust the administration that brought Elliott Abrams back into public service, hired John Ashcroft and Ted Olson to oversee the Justice Department, and continues to employ Paul Wolfowitz to appoint a new "Intelligence Czar," essentially handing to that person a job it took J. Edgar Hoover 50 years to build for himself. I'm feeling very bipartisan about that.

Also, the Democratic people better get ready. The report may be bipartisan, but it's political utility won't be. If the specific blame isn't in the report, it's going to be part of the campaign whether John Kerry wants it to be or not. After all, this fall, we all get to decide whether, finally, after more than three years, somebody besides 300,000 baggage handlers will actually lose a job behind the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

Indeed.