Jan
8
Terrorist Politics
January 8, 2010 | Tagged bush, Giuliani, Matlin, obama, Perino, Politics, Terrorism | Leave a Comment
It should be clear to everyone now that the politicians who run your government have no intention of actually trying to stop terrorism. Why should they? The threat of terrorist attacks is one of the main reasons some of these people still have jobs. They continue to use the fear of attacks to scare the rest of us into supporting them and opposing the other guy. They really don’t care if a few hundred, or thousand, more regular people die in the process.
Let’s go back just a bit to start this discussion.
On November 24, 2009, Dano Perino stated that there were no terrorist attacks under the Bush administration. As a guest on Fox News’ Hannity show she said,
We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.
On December 27, 2009, Mary Matalin claimed that Bush inherited the 9-11 attacks while a guest on CNN’s State of the Union. She said,
I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton, and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.
Then on January 7, 2010 Rudy Giuliani appeared on Good Morning America and continued to deny that there were any terrorist attacks during Bush’s presidency. He told George Stephanopoulos,
We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.
And surprisingly, Stephanopoulos didn’t even challenge him on this. I thought that he, of all show hosts, would call out this outright lie.
It seems that Republicans have a new strategy to have us forget that the 9-11 attacks, and other acts of terrorism, took place under Bush’s administration. If they are successful in this, then they can easily show that Obama and the Democrats have failed to protect the country. This strategy fits into the long-standing theme that Democrats are weak on national security and easy on criminals, so it’s not a big stretch to convince their base that Bush had a 100% success rate in protecting us from terrorism.
The fact is that terrorism is a part of the world today. There is nothing that can be done by Republicans or Democrats to save us from future attacks.
But while nothing can be done to fully protect ourselves from future attacks, the political games that are being played by both sides on this issue will only serve to weaken our defenses.
The December 25, 2009 attempt to blow up an airplane bound to Detroit is one example of how ineffective your government is at dealing with terrorist threats. There were many warning signs and chances to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded that flight. (I won’t go into all of them here, but many are noted on his Wikipedia page.)
The point is that the failures of the government to identify this terrorist are the same failures that facilitated the 9-11 attacks and the failed shoe-bombing attack in 2001 (during Bush’s presidency, by the way). Among these are failures to properly analyze and coordinate intelligence, failed physical security screenings at airports, and just poor work from people who had information on potential attacks.
So instead of trying to work to resolve these issues, our political leaders focus their efforts on blaming the other guy for things going wrong and giving credit to themselves for the great work they did. But nine years after the 9-11 attacks, your government has done nothing to really make you safer. The politicians benefit from your continued fear, so they continue to blame each other for the mess we are in and only they benefit from their own mess.