Rudy Giuliani: Fear Monger

Rudy Giuliani recently announced his "Twelve Commitments to the American People." Take a look, there are some interesting things, but I only want to comment on the first: "I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us."

"War on Us?" Well, that doesn't sound as happy-go-lucky. Indeed, it sounds rather like, what's that phrase I'm thinking of? Oh yeah... fear mongering. Maybe I'm naive, and maybe I have too much faith in the American people, but six years after 9/11, I think the power of fear mongering has faded. And Rudy shouldn't be allowed to get away with it just because he was there. If I were Bill Maher, I would say, "New Rule: Rudy Giuliani has to get off the 9/11 train. We get it, you were there, you said some nice things to comfort some people, but honestly, any halfway decent mayor would have done just as good of a job. And let's face it, 9/11 is the only reason that you're politically relevant these days. You were lucky, Rudy. You're the Ringo Starr of the presidential race. So, stop pointing out that you're here for a really bad reason and just hope that no one catches on."

Bill Maher's funnier than I am. Oh well.

On a slightly different note, I was watching a Mitt ad, and something struck me.

When Republicans candidates talk about wasteful spending, they have to be talking about President Bush. So, when the Republican crowds cheer for these Republican candidates, they're really cheering against their Republican president, whom they probably still "strongly support" in polls. Perhaps this (i.e. suggesting that we need some rather vauge notiong of change) is the closest any of the Republicans will come to attacking Bush. We shall see.

Little sympathy for Tenet

More reaction to former CIA chief George Tenet's self-justifying new book. Former Time magazine editor and chairman of CNN Walter Isaacson weighs in:

George Tenet's woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority... I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.

As does the flamethrowing Christopher Hitchens, in an article entitled "A Loser's History":

The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.
...
And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.