Ah, the tender days of 2004. We’re three years past 9/11, though it feels like a week. We’re a little over a year into war with Iraq, and have recently seen the horrific kidnapping and mutilation of four American workers in Iraq. Those of us who question our strategy in Iraq are called naïve at best, terrorist sympathizers at worst. Michelle Malkin, who wondered if John Kerry's Vietnam wounds were self-inflicted, published a book that year defending racial profiling and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
And when some raise questions about why the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded threat level seems to go up every time presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry takes the lead in the polls, we’re told to STFU. Secretary Tom Ridge assures us that DHS doesn’t play politics.
Fast-forward five years. Oops! It turns out that DHS *did* in fact raise the threat level in order to manipulate public fears about terrorist attacks, knowing that this would play into the hands of the Chicken Little wing of the GOP. At least, that’s what Ridge claims in his new book. (Which I'm sure he's giving away for free...)
I kind of feel about this the way I felt about former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan, and, as much as I personally respect him, Colin Powell. Either Ridge didn’t fight hard enough back in ’04 for what he now says he knew was right, or he’s shading the truth to make himself look better in hindsight. Either way, he’s chickensh*t.
I’m really tired of Bush Administration officials who played along as long as they were getting a paycheck, only to cash in bashing their own policies once they’d moved on. You know, I’ve had jobs where, for whatever reason, I didn’t buy into the leadership. And, even though I’m not a highly placed government official, I managed to scrape together the integrity to leave those jobs – sometimes lucky enough to have another job and sometimes not.
Please don’t tell me that this one time five years ago you strongly believed that your boss was screwing up and blatantly lying to the American people in the process and you didn’t do anything to stop it, though you could have – “Well, I guess I could’ve pushed harder and saved 5,000 American lives, not to mention billions of dollars, half a million Iraqi lives and America’s reputation, but gosh, I was afraid the president would yank my super-cool nickname” – and expect to actually care what you have to say.
Rachel’s take:
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