"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."On September 7, Vice President made these prophetic remarks. Since then, he and the rest of the Bush administration have been desperately trying to walk back his remarks. They've been trying to walk back Dick Cheney's remarks because there is no reason to believe that we'll be any more open to attack in a Kerry administration that we are in a Bush administration.
For starters, the September 11 attacks occurred on George W. Bush's watch. That's right -- George W. Bush and his team of international incompetents had plenty of warnings that Al Qaeda was going to attack us, and failed to stop it. Nobody has bothered to say this aloud lately, but it's still true.
Something else nobody is saying -- three years later, George W. Bush has failed to find Osama bin Laden. Despite his pseudo-macho "wanted, dead or alive", he practically stopped the search for bin Laden, just when we had him surrounded, in order to invade a country that was never a threat to us.
And nobody is saying that because of his actions, George W. Bush has become the poster child for Al Qaeda recruitment. Regardless of how many people we kill or capture, there are always plenty of new terrorists ready to take their place. Even George W. Bush knows his tactics will never work, which is why, in an unguarded moment, he told NBC's Matt Lauer that we can't win the war on terror.
But the big thing nobody is saying is that Dick Cheney was right.
George W. Bush and his entire administration, from Dick Cheney on down, have made the "war on terror" the central theme of his campaign. But George W. Bush has not been fighting a "war on terror". Instead, he has avoided fighting this war, and if we choose him on November 2, the danger is that we'll get hit again.
Thanks to the George W. Bush's refusal to go after the terrorists, his insistence on attacking people who have never been a threat to us, and his utter failure to capitalize on the outpouring of world support following the attacks of September 11, we are in greater danger than ever. The terrorists are just getting stronger.
Which means that voting for George W. Bush this fall would be "the wrong choice".
Copyright 2004, Dan Jacoby
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