Maybe I'm Living in the Past®. But this from today's NY Times makes me want to scream from the top of rafters:
Shivraj Patil, the home minister of India and responsible for public safety and internal security as one of the most senior members of the government, resigned on Sunday to take responsibility for the failure of the country’s intelligence services and military to prevent the deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
Mr. Patil’s resignation is the clearest sign yet that the current government is feeling pressure from the general public in India to make amends for not preventing the attack.
Compare to Condoleeza Rice on the 911 attacks
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Yet the myth of the Republicans being the party of personal responsibility lives on. What a joke.
Just think for a minute if instead of exploiting 9/11 to realize the vision of the Project for a New American Century, the Bush "administration" made an honest assessment of the brush-clearing failure to recognize the real threats facing America.
Just compare the Indian government's shame over its failure to do more to anticipate the horrific events in Mumbai vs. the deer-in-the-headlights "The Pet Goat" moment; spiritual leaders blaming 9/11 on the ACLU and gays; the Rice dissembles; the seven long years of detention and torture; the indefensible deaths of a million Iraqis; the drain of America's human and monetary resources; the trashing of international good will towards America in the wake of 9/11.
On January 1, 2004, I called into C-SPAN's Washington Journal with my New Year's predictions: The Plame investigation would not be settled before the November presidential election; Pat Roberts would not release findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe into 9/11 intelligence failures before the November election; and Bush would be re-elected. The host asked me why I sounded so despondent, and why I was so certain. I wanted to reply, "Because we are a nation of idiots." Instead I said, "I don't think America has the drive or capacity to get to the bottom of how wrong the Bush administration has been."
We will become a better nation under Obama. But I wonder if history will ever write the truth about just how bad it got because our leaders did not say, "We failed to do the right things to prevent these attacks." What different course might we have charted...
Updated headline.