Perhaps I am mellowing—politically that is.
As a Democrat, I usually like and agree with the opinion pieces that Frank Rich writes.
And so it was with his most recent column in the New York Times, “Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?”, although something in the piece left me somewhat unsettled.
In his otherwise excellent piece, Rich rightly condemns Cheney’s recent attempts to once again “using lies and fear… rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency…”
He also bemoans how:
Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.
Rich was referring to:
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute [that] arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days…bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
Rich is correct in condemning the incessant and groundless Republican attacks that the Obama administration is making our country “less safe,” that Obama’s “half measures” are leaving Americans “half exposed,” that Obama is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11,” and the G.O.P. implication that “In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault.”
Rich also highlights the lies, errors, and failures of the Cheney-Bush administration when it comes to torture, capturing Osama bin Laden, weapons of mass destrcution, vanquishing Al Qaeda, and the biggest one of them all, the war in Iraq—and how these lies and failures make us less safe today.
Rich concludes:
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
But something didn’t feel quite right, as I said at the beginning.
Then I re-read the article and caught it. Referring to Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture, Rich writes:
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch.
Perhaps Rich did not intend his remarks to be taken literally.
But they did strike a nerve with me.
As we remember all too well, Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq, were shamelessly and ceaselessly accused by the Bush administration and its followers of not supporting the troops and, worse, of wanting America to fail—to lose the war.
We must not stoop to such levels now.
Just as Americans would never wish their country to fail militarily for political purposes, I do not believe Americans would “root” for another terrorist attack just to make a political point—almost, or not almost.
