Toles Rant: "Who Knows?"

[n2doc]

By Tom Toles
Have we all finished calibrating our dudgeon now on whether or not Obama spiked the football re bin Laden? It’s a fascinating calculation in the way that manufactured hysteria has come to be considered fascinating in our policy discussions.

This one only registered 2.3 on our collective Richter scale of histrionics, mostly because halfway into their tirade about mixing foreign policy and politics, the Republicans had some second thoughts. No, they weren’t worried that such things get mixed, as the GOP is the National Cuisinart of foreign policy/politics mash-ups. No they decided that maybe they didn’t want to bring too much attention to the ‘bin Laden is dead now and he wasn’t before’ thing.

And speaking of dudgeon, this is the one aspect of the whole post-9/11 world that remains weirdly unexplained and unexamined. Exactly WHY WAS IT that Bush didn’t seem to care much about getting bin Laden? Here we have the acknowledged ATTACKER OF THE UNITED STATES and MURDERER OF ITS CITIZENS. But we “don’t spend too much time on him”? Really? We spent a whole heck of a lot of time on Saddam Hussein, though whether that was ‘quality time’ is a subject unto itself. But in a nation that never tires of painting the current president as “passive,” where have been the questions about Bush’s apparently narcoleptic policy on bin Laden? And Romney’s peculiar echoing of it? Was it, is it still, the position of the Republican party that in their self-described defining issue of our time, “the War on Terror,” that somehow the one unmistakable, proven enemy of the United States was not very important? This simply defies explanation. Got one? Just image if Obama had given that rambling equivocation about not worrying about bin Laden. Just imagine it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-who-knows-edition/2012/05/03/gIQAZ134yT_blog.html

[JHB]

1. Let's not forget Bush's narcolepsy about the USS Cole...

The Republicans never fail to blame Clinton for not taking action, but if I recall correctly the action they most often suggested was "bomb Saddam". They weren't particularly interested in waiting for the investigation to tell us who might be the actual perpetrators.

That investigation was completed on Jan. 19, 2001, the day before George W. Bush was inaugurated. So Clinton didn't have enough information to take proper action, but Bush did, and did nothing.

As in: Didn't. Do. Jack.

[yurbud]

2. and Bush looked the other way on his buddies the Saudi government's role in 9/11:

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/03/foia-doc-shows-911commission-lied-about.html

And recently, former Senators Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey have said there's strong evidence of Saudi government involvement in 9/11.

So of course Bush smoked cigars with Bandar a few days after 9/11 and went on to invade Iraq and kill a million Iraqis.