WP, Dionne: Tears for U.S., when 9/11 topic is Bush's political survival

[DeepModem Mom]

Vanished Towers, Vanished Leadership
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, September 8, 2006; Page A17

....Five years later, you look at the rancid state of our politics, the decline in America's standing in the world and the behavior of our national leadership, and you want to shed tears for your nation. This year, so much of what's being said about the events of Sept. 11 is about the political survival of the Bush administration....

***

Understanding the hope and truly national feeling of determination during that extraordinary moment five years ago is the only way to comprehend why hostility to the president has become so strong and why the country is now so divided. The temptation to use the nation's abhorrence of terrorism as a political tool was simply too strong for Bush to resist.

By mid-2002, the fight against terrorism was a means for winning a midterm election. A significant portion of the Republican National Convention in 2004 was given over to turning Sept. 11 into the backdrop for the Bush reelection campaign.

And on Tuesday, there was Bush's truly astonishing address to the Military Officers Association of America. Having not talked much about Osama bin Laden for years, Bush couldn't stop talking about him....Building up the theoretical threat of bin Laden's "radical empire" is a nifty way to shift attention away from the questions on the minds of most voters. What will this administration do to fix its flawed and terribly executed policy in Iraq? And if bin Laden is the threat after all, what exactly are we doing in Iraq? And why have we allowed the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate?

The president has no good answers, so he wants to lift the whole debate to a misty, ideological plane where he can bunch bin Laden with Hitler and Lenin as totalitarian threats. A president who kept quiet about bin Laden when doing so served his political purposes now revives him rhetorically just before the anniversary of Sept. 11, at a moment when his party is in grave jeopardy in another election....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701619.html?nav=most_emailed

[AX10]

1. K & R!

[seafan]

2. More:

And on Tuesday, there was Bush's truly astonishing address to the Military Officers Association of America. Having not talked much about Osama bin Laden for years, Bush couldn't stop talking about him. By my count, bin Laden got 17 mentions.

Bush touted bin Laden's dream of a "caliphate" that "would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia."

Building up the theoretical threat of bin Laden's "radical empire" is a nifty way to shift attention away from the questions on the minds of most voters.

snip

Whenever the president gets into trouble, he tries to remind us of who he was in the months immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. Most of us respected that George W. Bush.
But maybe that Bush was just a figment of the imagination of all Americans who actually thought the events of five years ago transcended partisan politics. Too bad that was an illusion.

[enough]

3. k&r

[suegeo]

4. The junta's biggest failure is its biggest success

What a psych op.

We had people running through the streets for their lives, towers blown up, the seat of our defense dept. attacked, and people still think of this as a republican success. Republicans are great on security.

Boggles my mind.