9/11 and the Cynicism of Republican Leaders

A number of neocons are advocating war with Iran or even world war three. It's hard to understand how more war run by incompetents would make us safer. What's even more odious are the continued attempts by Republican politicians to keep using 9/11 to scare the voters. Paul Krugman of The New York Times brings up a few points in his column today:

We now know that from the very beginning, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress saw the terrorist threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a political opportunity to be exploited. The story of the latest terror plot makes the administration's fecklessness and cynicism on terrorism clearer than ever.

Fecklessness: the administration has always pinched pennies when it comes to actually defending America against terrorist attacks. Now we learn that terrorism experts have known about the threat of liquid explosives for years, but that the Bush administration did nothing about the threat until now, and tried to divert funds from programs that might have helped protect us. "As the British terror plot was unfolding," reports The Associated Press, "the Bush administration quietly tried to take away $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new explosives detection technology."

Cynicism: Republicans have consistently portrayed their opponents as weak on terrorism, if not actually in sympathy with the terrorists. Remember the 2002 TV ad in which Senator Max Cleland of Georgia was pictuerd with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?

The profoundly dishonest leadership of the new Republican Republican Party marches on. We went two years without terrorist alerts but the midterm elections are upon us. Will Americans be fooled again or will they notice the many failures of Bush and his friends? It seems to me that tens of millions of Americans have caught on to George W. Bush; hopefully a few more million will at long last catch on as well.