Dana Perino on following OBL to gates of Hell: "This is not the movies. We don't have super powers"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Perino: No "Super Powers" To Help Find Bin Laden

BEN FELLER | September 10, 2008 12:57 PM EST | AP

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/10/perino-no-super-powers-to_n_125474.html

WASHINGTON — The White House said Wednesday that the failure to capture Osama bin Laden in the seven years since the Sept. 11 attacks shows the limitations of military and intelligence power.

"This is not the movies. We don't have super powers," said White House press secretary Dana Perino. "But what we do have is very dedicated people who are working with our allies and trying to bring (al-Qaida leaders) to justice."

Bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida network that orchestrated the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, is believed to be in the lawless tribal belt of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

His status as an at-large enemy of the United States tends to come back into focus with every somber anniversary of the 2001 attacks. Beyond a matter of national security, bin Laden's elusiveness has elicited fire from President Bush's critics, who accuse Bush of being wrongly focused on Iraq.

"The Bush administration has failed to put the necessary resources and manpower into the hunt for America's No. 1 enemy," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday. "President Bush has rightly said that the war on terror is about more than just one man. Yet seven years after 9/11, the president has allowed that one man's vast al-Qaida network to regroup."

Perino said the intelligence community's hunt for bin Laden has been relentless, and that Bush has never let up.

She added that the government has had success in disrupting the terror network, including the capture of the confessed Sept. 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He is jailed at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as he awaits trial.

Bush and first lady Laura Bush will mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Thursday during a moment of silence on the South Lawn. It will happen at 8:46 a.m. _ the exact moment in 2001 when terrorists slammed the first of two jetliners into the World Trade Center in New York. The president also will attend a ceremony at the Pentagon for the dedication of a memorial for the people killed there.

"Tomorrow is obviously a very sober anniversary for Americans," Perino said. "The president thinks about 9/11 every single day when he wakes up and before he goes to bed. This is what he's concerned about. He's always been concerned about another attack on our country. Thankfully, we haven't had one."

[napi21]

1. Maybe she should tell THEIR candidate that! HE'S the one

who said he would follow hi to the gates of HELL!

[Kutjara]

2. So the world's leading Super Power doesn't have super powers?

This bit is pretty telling as well: "The president thinks about 9/11 every single day when he wakes up and before he goes to bed. This is what he's concerned about. He's always been concerned about another attack on our country. Thankfully, we haven't had one." So basically Perino is saying the reason there hasn't been another attack is down to luck? Seems to me the subtext is that Chimpy worries daily about another attack, but has no ideas about how to prevent one, so he just frets and hopes for the best. Lovely.

[tannybogus]

3. But McCain's a POW!!! He can do it! nt

[beac]

10. Yeah! He has Super POWers!!

But he won't be able to use them for 5-and-a-half-years. :(

[marmar]

4. Something tells me she wasn't a Rhodes scholar in a former life.....

:dunce:

[bemildred]

5. "We're an empire now. ..."

Delusions of Empire

Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, has a piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine that is the talk of the internet, and with good reason: it is a devastating portrait of this "faith-based" presidency, with its religio-cultural idiosyncrasies and foibles. But it is not only that. Suskind manages to capture, in a series of vivid anecdotes, the political psychopathology that motivates this administration and shapes its perception. Here is the money quote:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Anyone who believes that governments create reality is living in a fantasy world, and is surely no conservative, neo- or otherwise, either politically or temperamentally. As the conservative philosopher Claes Ryn has pointed out,

"Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3822

[morillon]

11. I have always wondered...

...just who that senior adviser was. Did it ever come out?

[TomInTib]

6. What I don't understand is why didn't God,....

when he was telling LittleMan to smite the Evil-Doers, just tell him where the dude was.

[Fumesucker]

7. Sure we do..

[fascisthunter]

8. Republicans Sound Like Nerds Who Read and Believe in Comic Books

[bemildred]

9. That is an excellent description. nt