Just Walk Away

Just Walk Away - The Clarke story is sinking faster than Michael Jackson's chart vitality. As I mentioned on the Northern Alliance show last Saturday, now that the Republicans on the 9/11 panel have cut the guts out of Clarke's assertions, the media is backing away - or, more accurately, changing the subject.

David Adesnik at Oxblog reports that the WaPo is flip-flopping on the Clarke story. In the meantime, the Star/Tribune is de-emphasizing Clarke and re-casting the story as just another election-year squabble, in Washington correspondent James Rosen's tellingly-titled "Cease-fire ends; blame game starts".

Huh-wha? "Cease-fire" "ends"? When was it a cease fire? And does anyone remember why it ended? Will the Strib, which carps endlessly about the "death of civility" in American politics, deign to note that it was the Democrats who decided to turn the 9/11 commission into a political circus by arranging the stage-managed interview in last week's edition of "Sixty Minutes?"

For 30 months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Republicans and Democrats honored an implicit agreement to avoid casting blame.

Now, with the publication of former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke's incendiary book and a fierce counterattack by top White House officials and the Senate Republican leader, the cease-fire is off.

For a week, Americans heard a barrage of accusations and countercharges as Clarke and the nation's highest military and diplomatic policymakers over the past 12 years gave media interviews or testified before the national commission investigating the 2001 attacks.

When all the hours of debate had ended, the exchanges could be distilled to a single politically explosive question:

Who is more responsible for the worst attacks ever on the American homeland -- Bill Clinton or George W. Bush?

And with that, the Strib tries to change the subject of the debate.

Because the real politically-explosive question is "Which party -- Bill Clinton or George W. Bush -- did more to prevent another such attack from ever happening again? And which candidate -- Bush or Kerry -- is likely to do more in the future?"

But from where I sit, the second question is by any rational measure very, very easy to answer.

Posted by Mitch at March 30, 2004 06:00 AM