It's NOT a Badge of Honor

So Quit Wrapping Yourself in It

A couple of days ago I noticed a few stories mentioning Karl Rove's upcoming 2006 strategery. Amazingly, I'll quote the fat boy himself--he summed up thusly:

"Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

Now, I'm certainly not the first to call bullshit, but it's high time we finally come to our senses and kicked Team Bush off the free ride they've enjoyed for almost four and a half years. 9/11/01, terrible as it was/is, shouldn't be considered a blank check. With the passage of time, and ESPECIALLY after Hurricane Katrina, it's not a bad idea to point out how much of the Bush plan fails the smell test.

Schroeder posted today about Frat Boy in Chief's "work ethic". America Blog--and Oliver Willis--note Shrub's lazy, on-again, off-again tough-guy act when it comes to Osama bin Laden. Tbogg reminds us of Shrub's first 'heckuva job'...and, I'm repeating myself here, but 9/11 was almost EIGHT MONTHS into the dauphin's first term. If they want to argue in favor of his being a weenie, requiring "special time" to "grow into the job," well, let 'em. Because I'll counter with "I expect the nation's chief executive to be capable of the job from day 1," and I vote accordingly. They're welcome to take the opposing point of view.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, sadly, balance 9/11, and demonstrate exactly the lameness, the hollowness, and the utter incapability not only of boy king George the Witless, but of the entire GOP program. For an entire generation, the public image of the GOP--government as anathema--is offset by their own zeal to feed at the trough AND their insistance on a national security state...the latter, by the way, characterized by mismanagement and incompetence on the scale of Spectrum 7 (well, if we're lucky, these dingbats are doing just as well with their warrantless spying).

What's the difference between a natural disaster like Katrina and a terrorist attack? Well, a hurricane's landfall can be predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy, for one. But either implies a most unnatural loss of life and destruction of property.

Of late, though, one SIMULARITY between a natural disaster like Katrina and a terrorist attack is that the preznit can't be bothered to stop vacationing long enough to even attempt mitigating actions. On August 6, 2001, he was warned about the threat from Al Qaeda--specifically, that they would try to hijack airplanes (and earlier still he'd been told of the possibility that terrorists might try to use planes as weapons). Before Katrina, Shrub was warned of levee toppings, breaches, the potential for massive flooding--and the large number of people unable to evacuate.

His response? Nothing.

Not surprisingly, Team Bush is running a full-court stall/ignore/hope-the-press stops-asking-about-it strategy when it comes to the storms (anyone notice how Hurricane Rits truly HAS dropped from the collective radar screen?)...but they CONTINUE to flog 9/11 and wallow around in it to the extent that you'd think a pre-indicted Jack Abramoff war chest of lobbying dollars sat in the hole that is Ground Zero.

No, they should be ASHAMED that such an awful thing could happen on their watch. And it's time they were told that.