Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [66]
What does that mean? What is it like for John Ashcroft when he takes a trip to Rome? Does he walk around with an erection all the time?
And $8,000? I have a better idea for what to do with that money. USE IT TO FIGHT TERRORISM!!! Buy the FBI a new computer! Remember how, during the Senate-House Intelligence Committee hearings on the FBI, agents testified that the Bureau’s computers could not do the equivalent of a Google search? Because of a security measure known as “stovepiping,” they cannot search for two words at a time.
They can’t search for “al Qaeda.” To search for al Qaeda, they first have to go through every “Al.” They go through me, they go through Al Gore, they have to read every Weird Al Yankovich lyric.
By contrast, someone searching with Google can go straight to the al Qaeda home page, with its valuable searchable member database.
The White House had fought hearings on the intelligence agencies until it was shamed into them after Americans learned of the President’s August 6, 2001, briefing regarding al Qaeda’s unwholesome intentions. That information had been leaked as part of an escalating feud between the FBI and the CIA over which was more to blame for 9/11. In keeping with the spirit of Operation Ignore, the Bush administration had done nothing to encourage cooperation between the two agencies. As Jim Walsh, an expert on terrorism at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told me, “We expected another attack, but we didn’t do the first thing you’d do to prevent it.”
One highlight of the hearings was the testimony of agent Colleen Rowley, a courageous whistleblower from the Minneapolis bureau, who reminded the country how the Bush administration had committed the cardinal sin of dropping the ball while failing to connect the dots.
In a desperate bid to change the subject, President Bush proposed the most sweeping reorganization of the federal government since the Truman administration. Suddenly, after arguing against it for nine months, Bush and Rove made an about-face and decided to create a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. John DiIulio described it as “remarkably slapdash” and “a politically-timed reversal” which had received little more than “talking-points deliberation.”
Immediately, Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who had months earlier written legislation urging just such a reorganization, fell into line behind the plan. Bush had turned the lemons of embarrassment into the lemonade of a popular idea.
Little did the Democrats suspect that this seemingly bipartisan lemonade would be served with a date-rape pill.
The pill came in the form of a provision to deprive the new department’s employees of civil service protection. It was a brilliant move. Democrats were put in the awkward position of voting against a Homeland Security Department or betraying one of their most loyal constituencies, one that needed to be insulated from coercive political pressures. As Cleland would put it, “I don’t think you make America more safe by making the workers that protect America more unsafe.”
When Senate Democrats voted against the legislation, President Bush didn’t hesitate to debase the debate. “The Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people,” Bush railed at a fund-raiser in New Jersey. The tone was set for the 2002 midterm elections.
When you think of someone who isn’t interested in the security of the American people, you think of Senator Max Cleland wheeling his merry way