Truth - Al Franken [10]
A president must not shift in the wind; a president has to make tough decisions and stand by them. Especially in a time of war, mixed signals only confuse our friends and embolden our enemies. All progress on every other issue depends on the safety of our citizens. Americans will go to the polls Tuesday in a time of war and ongoing threats. The terrorists who killed thousands of innocent people are still dangerous, and they’re determined to strike. The most solemn duty of the American President is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty or weakness in these troubling times, the world will drift toward tragedy. This is not going to happen on my watch.
Or, as Dick Cheney had put it more succinctly seven and a half weeks earlier:
It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war.
As obnoxious as that was, I thought his next comments, which were not so widely reported, were even worse:
Further, we have very credible intelligence that tells us that if Kerry wins, the following states will be hit: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Mexico. What’s more, terrorists are also threatening to attack any state in which the Democrats pick up a Senate seat.
The implication was clear. A Kerry victory would cost millions, if not hundreds of millions, or even billions, of lives.2
Enhancing the terrifying effect of these terror remarks was a steady drumbeat of terrifying terror alerts. From the first terror alert on February 12, 2002, until the November 2, 2004, election, the Bush administration raised the nationwide threat level to orange, meaning a “high risk of terrorist attack,” six times.
For the record, during that period there were no terrorist attacks. Also for the record, there have been no nationwide orange alerts since the election. Also for the record, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has now gone on the record to say that he didn’t know why they kept issuing alerts. A few months after leaving office, Ridge complained that there was often only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, but that he was overruled by other administration officials, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, master of the frightening press conference. As Ridge put it, “There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?’ ”
Could it be that the “that” in question might have been Bush’s reelection rather than credible threat information? Could it be that terror alerts like the August 1, 2004, warning, which was based almost entirely (if not entirely entirely) on intelligence obtained prior to 9/11, were more geared toward freaking people out than protecting them? Could it be, as cynics charged, that the much-vaunted Homeland Security apparatus was less about homeland security and more about politics?
Sorry, cynics! Asked about a possible political motive the day after the suspiciously unwarranted August 1 alert, Tom Ridge was firm: “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.”
On the other, cynical, hand, it did come out after the election that Ridge had met with hotshot Republican pollsters Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff just four days before embarking on the first of his sixteen trips to ten swing states at the height of the campaign season.3