A Pickup Basketball Team That Made It To The Final Four

by Steve

Read this interview to get a sense how one pigheaded administration can make all the wrong choices, so that our enemies no longer respect or fear our military. And then ask yourself if Bush made a mountain out of a molehill in how he responded to 9/11.

For a president who had approval ratings under 50% on September 10th, 2001, and whose administration was already being talked about as a failure, there was an obvious political benefit in amplifying 9/11 into World War III, as evidenced by Rumsfeld's questioning of whether or not the attacks could be pinned on Saddam, Richard Clarke's repeated attempts to get Paul Wolfowitz and the president to focus on Al Qaeda and not Saddam, and the Patriot Act and NSA programs. We will soon spend a trillion dollars for all Afghanistan and Iraq-related activities, as well as the war on terror, and the simple fact is that we are less safe now than we were on September 10th, 2001. Both countries are broken as a direct result of the Bush Administration, creating new breeding grounds for the next round of "pickup basketball teams" that want to copy what Al Qaeda pulled off with Saudi help on September 11th. In addition, our "allies" like Pakistan and the Saudis have done little if not actually contributed to the threats against us during these last five years, while we missed chances to work with regimes that were natural enemies of Al Qaeda in Syria and Iran, and even Iraq.

And yet Bush and Rove are poised to replay the same campaign against the Democrats this year that they did in 2002 and 2004 because the party has still not learned the new language and campaign strategies employed by this country's current cabal of fascists, nor has the party had the courage to go toe to toe with the GOP about their pathetic record in fighting a supposed war on terror.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.