The "war on terrorism" frame let * get away with not getting Bin Laden

[CTLawGuy]

Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had failed to find, prosecute and punish Tim McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing? How much would people (not just Republicans, but independents and many Democrats) really be pissed off at him? How mad would you be at a police force that couldn't catch someone who perpetrated a major crime in a community? The chief would probably be run out of town.


Then why didn't people hold Bush accountable for not catching bin Laden? Simple, because the Democrats allowed Bush to frame 9-11 as an "act of war" rather than a crime. In a war, you don't need to find, capture and prosecute the enemy. You just need to send troops everywhere and drop lots of bombs, and people will be satisfied. If 9-11 were properly framed as a crime by an organization of thugs, Bush would have been raked over the coals for not catching bin laden.

The major problem with the war idea is that private citizens cannot start wars. If that were true you could conceivably call any murder an act of war (because war consists of killing people). You could certainly call Tim McVeigh's bombing an act of war, since he wanted to attack the federal government.

We should have challenged the "war" frame immediately after 9-11. We should have called for Bush to capture bin Laden as a criminal, and Kerry should have held him accountable for not doing so.

Hopefully we have learned from this experience and will not repeat it.

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Remember when Kerry was excoriated for suggesting terrorism

be handled as a global criminal problem (like the war on drugs, for example) in the NYT Mag piece?

He was RIGHT!

[paineinthearse]

2. George Lakoff was on CSPAN this morning

Watch streaming at www.cspan.org or watch for re-broadcasts.