SharedThought

President Bush regales us with tales of working untiringly to protect us from terrorists, and keeping us all safe. God bless him. But his own record belies the that claim. While most of us toil in our day jobs five days a week, fifty plus weeks a year, he spends most of his time either campaigning or on vacation. I realize I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole here, but am I wrong in the assumption that our President can do the job best while actually being present in Washington, D.C., and not on the road? Any familiar with the telecommuting experiment can testify that being away from the office, and absent your support staff and command structure is a formula for missed communications and lost opportunities.
If Mr. Bush’s goal is truly what he proclaims, I am bewildered by his absence from his base of operations. This is the man who was on a “working” vacation for the entire month of August 2001, during which time the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) entitled, “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US”, was delivered to him and his staff. Despite previous attacks on the US and its interests by Osama Bin-Laden, this PDB was ignored. There was no executive direction to follow up on the issue. For excerpts from the memo, go to this site: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/
The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurred on President Bush’s watch. Fully one month after the explicit warning from his intelligence resources. This is protecting the United States? How this makes him better equipped to deal with the mounting threat of terrorism is beyond me. It only bolsters evidence that the manner in which he once again ignores his own intelligence now about the state of affairs in Iraq is dangerous to our well-being. In the aftermath of the attacks, did Mr. Bush then buckle down and say in his mind, “My God, how did we miss this? How can we ensure this does not happen again? Let us leave no stone unturned in the quest to get to bottom of it!” Did he set his mind to working extremely hard, every waking moment, to thwart the terrorists, and the “Axis of Evil”? The evidence doesn’t point to it. In fact, this man is an absentee president. How can you lead if you’re not there? By telephone and fax? Ever try to run an office as a boss if you don’t show up to mind the store? You know what they say about mice and cats. The fact is, that this man and his foot soldiers did their best in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent a broad investigation in to the roots of the intelligence and security failures which resulted in the disaster. Only under extreme duress from the families of the victims themselves, and their subsequent public airing of their complaints did this administration did the investigation really begin to take shape. See these links for a look at the truth of the matter. http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/1610361.php

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/1610361.php

And go to this link for a laundry list of obstructionist tactics by Bushco. http://www.rense.com/general37/brief.htm
Mr. Bush has spent all or part of over 500 days of his term away from Washington, D.C., whether at his ranch, Camp David, Kennebunkport, or elsewhere. This is not including the time he has spent, virtually since January 21, 2001, on the road in his campaign for re-election. Including those periods, our “War” president, the man guarding our future, and the person with the charge of protecting us from terror, has spent eighty percent of his term away from the White House.
Once again, idealist talking, but is it unreasonable to expect the leader of the Free World to show up at the office? Prior to the election in 2001, a central issue in my view was that W just wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. My Republican friends assured me that this was just not very important, that that staff he had assembled was the key. That his staff was the real brains of the outfit, and that the President had only to then make his decisions based on staff input. If they are to blame, then make this election a referendum on their performance. However, this President has shown an unparalleled ability to ignore rational input from objective sources, and time after time makes decisions based in personal philosophical leanings, and not tangible evidence. He takes credit for he ability to make decisions and stay the course. But makes no room for the possibility that any decision could have been even one iota mistaken. This has placed the United States and its citizens more firmly in the sights of terrorists than ever. The scariest thing to me? I am now more afraid of my own government than of a terrorist attack. That is my fear.

Four More Years? God help us.

The Absentee Commander-in-Chief by SharedThought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2004 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.