Dr. Rice's Magnificent Performance At The 9/11 Hearing
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (04/16/04)
LIBERALS playing the foreign policy blame-game is an irony worthy of O. Henry. It should top the list of absurd inconsistencies, right along with weeping clowns and fire stations engulfed in flames.
But that’s what the Party of No Ideas is doing. They’re pointing they’re blood-stained fingers at Republicans in an effort to discredit Condoleezza Rice, defeat President Bush, and lose the War on Terrorism to radical heathens.
Dr. Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission left liberals far-and-wide in supreme panic. Democrat hearts from Presque Isle to Palm Springs quickened in pace as Condi Rice, prodigious pianist, accomplished student, former Stanford provost, and foreign policy mastermind, outsmarted each and every Democrat stooge on the panel.
In response to Condi’s show-stopping performance, Democrats are saying Bush caused 9/11. This tactic was first brought to light when Bob Kerrey asked Rice why the Bush Administration hadn’t responded to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, which happened in October 2000.
I believe the most obvious answer to Kerrey’s query is: Ask Bill Clinton! Ask Clinton why he didn’t respond to terrorist attacks on the Cole, on our African embassies, on the World Trade Center. Ask Clinton why he didn’t respond in November 1995 when five Americans were killed in a car bomb explosion in Saudi Arabia. Ask Clinton why he didn’t respond when Iraq, in November 1997, threatened to shoot down one of our U-2 spy planes. Ask Clinton why he refused to take custody of bin Laden from the Sudanese government.
Having been thoroughly embarrassed by Rice’s magnificent presentation—a presentation they pleaded to hear—Democrats thought the next reasonable course of action would be to pick up their proverbial spade and dig a bit deeper. They were in urgent, burning need, they said, of the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing—which the Commission had already seen in private.
Sadly for them, the PDB turned out to be exactly what Condi said it was: an historical document containing no actionable intelligence. (Being under oath tends to mean something more to Republicans than it does to the traditional Democrat.)
Despite the PDB not really working out for them, Democrats have not given up. On the front page of Sunday's The New York Times there was an article entitled ''Inquiry Into Attack on the Cole in 2000 Missed 9/11 Clues.''
Perceptibly there were ''clues'' (i.e., the aforementioned attacks on U.S. interests), and obviously they were ''missed.'' The fact that thousands of Americans were slaughtered on 9/11 proves that point pretty well.
What’s stunning about The Times’ report wasn’t that America was so terribly naïve about the threat of terrorism under Clinton, but that so much of what caused 9/11 to be ''missed'' has been corrected under Bush.
In late August 2001, for example, Nawaq Alzhami, one of the September 11 hijackers, bought his airline ticket for American Airlines Flight 77. Khalid al-Midhar, another hijacker, tried to buy his, but was unable to do so because his address could not be verified. On September 5, however, he bought it with cash.
Meanwhile, the CIA asked that they be added to the State Department ''watch list,'' but, according to The Times, ''the FBI [was] unable to find them.'' This is a pristine example of the ''structural'' and ''systemic'' problems about which Rice spoke.
On September 11, the two men boarded the plane that would crash into the Pentagon.
In an effort to correct these problems, the administration has initiated such items as the Patriot Act (opposed by liberals); the war in Afghanistan (opposed by liberals); and the war in Iraq (opposed by liberals). Bush has yet to require racial-profiling in airports—but liberals oppose that, too.
Due to these unseemly positions, Democrats are hereby forbidden to discuss national security. If we need to fund a worthless art program or bow down to some bootlicking duck-squeezers we’ll call them. But when it comes to defending America, they are in no position to criticize anyone.
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