The Final Word on Bush and September 11

I have no idea who Al Franken is, and have never read his book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them", but if the excerpt here is anything to go by it's a fairly devastating assessment of the behaviour of the Bush administration in the lead up to September 11.

It seems irrelevant after the election, but in among the well known lines about briefings saying 'Al Queda intend to attack mainland America using passenger planes as weapons as in their foiled plot of 1996' you read things like:

"the longest presidential vacation in thirty-two years"

or

"[August], Alarmed by the report and by the mounting terrorist threat, [Thomas] Pickard[, FBI director,] met with Attorney General John Ashcroft to request $58 million from the Justice Department to hire hundreds of new field agents, translators, and intelligence analysts to improve the Bureau's capacity to detect foreign terror threats. On September 10, he received the final ... communique: an official letter from Ashcroft turning him down flat. (To give Pickard credit for adopting a professional attitude, he did not call Ashcroft the next day to say, "I told you so.'')"

or

"On September 9, ... Congress proposed a boost of $600 million for antiterror programs. The money was to come from Rumsfeld's beloved missile defense program, the eventual price tag of which was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at between $158 billion and $238 billion. Congress's proposal to shift $0.6 billion over to counterterror programs incurred Rummy's ire, and he threatened a presidential veto."

or

"On [September 10], Ashcroft sent his Justice Department budget request to Bush. It included spending increases in sixty-eight different programs. Out of these sixty-eight programs, less than half dealt with terrorism. Way less than half. In fact, none of them dealt with terrorism. Ashcroft passed around a memo listing his seven top priorities. Again, terrorism didn't make the list."

Could it really be any more straightforward? Any more blatant?
They. Did. Not. Have. A. Clue. What. They. Were. Doing.

Kerry failed because he focused on the war, which is a mess sure, but Bush's record on terrorism is appalling. Nominating himself to lead the "War on Terror" is like Clinton appointing himself the head of Promise Keepers.

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