'Wartime President' MIA (Washington Post)

[stevedeshazer]

Friday column by David Ignatius

<snip>

What would a "wartime president" have done this week, as a bipartisan commission's public hearings on the Sept. 11 tragedy were being engulfed by political bickering?

I like to think that this hypothetical leader would have found a way to rise above the fray and unite the country: He would have embraced the commission's work, forthrightly admitted his own mistakes, sent his national security adviser to testify publicly -- and insisted that the security of the United States was too important to be buried in election-year squabbles.

President Bush and his White House handlers did pretty much the opposite. They fanned the flames of partisan debate; when asked awkward questions, they stonewalled; rather than testify before the cameras, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice spent part of her Wednesday afternoon dishing dirt to reporters about a commission witness who had criticized the president.

Bush flunked the test, in other words. Rather than working to bring the country together, the Bush team added to its nasty political divisions -- and allowed them to contaminate the terrorism commission's work.

more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25465-2004Mar25.html

[Avalon Sparks]

1. What test hasn't he flunked?

Is what I wanna know.

[JDStutts]

2. B*sh would rather kill Iraq children than protect American kids

B*sh wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11. There is ample evidence that B*sh knew America would be attacked soon or later. He used 9/11 as an excuse to take out the guy who attacked his daddy. He let this happen to us. He is a tratior to his own people. Big oil money is more imortant than human life to him. Why doesn't the media cover his ties to the Bin Laden family? Wake up America!

[Eye and Monkey]

3. please note that the WP journalist praises Rumsfeld & Tenet

From the same article:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's crisp, candid testimony illustrated why so many people once assumed he would someday be president himself. He lauded the committee's work and then explained the difficulties he faced in framing a military response to al Qaeda in the months before Sept. 11. Perhaps most important, he reached out to the families of Sept. 11 victims in the hearing room, speaking of "the pain and the heartbreak and the suffering of the families whose loved ones perished."

More rumpled but just as impressive was CIA Director George Tenet. Even though he had been warning about the al Qaeda threat for nearly five years before Sept. 11, he took the blame for failing to stop the plot and to close the gaps in intelligence that prevented its detection. "We collectively did not close those gaps rapidly or fully enough before September 11th," Tenet admitted.