By Barry Crimmins, BarryCrimmins.com

Dear Dubyahoo,
It's no longer possible for any of us to ignore that man behind the curtain. That man would be you, Mr. Court-appointed President.
It's time for Congress to drop the pretense and stop paying lip service to the idea that current inquiries into 9-11 intelligence failures will not be used to assess blame. You are already exploiting this polite lie, aren't you, Georgie? How else could you act as if there is some distance between you and the truths that are finally surfacing concerning the terror attacks?

Yesterday you told us you wanted the investigation's scope narrow, its duration short and its transparency opaque. I'm sure Robert Blake feels the same way about his murder trial. But you see, Mr. Court-appointed President, alleged malefactors are not generally asked to describe the boundaries of investigations into their alleged malfeasance. And mark this well, oh son of the CIA, you are an alleged malefactor.

In other words, Junior, shut up until you are asked to answer some questions.

Let's not stand on ceremony here, it's beginning to look as if you were either responsible or irresponsible on 9-11. In either case, the inquiry isn't going to set you up as the person to decide when enough is enough. You may try to characterize this investigation as some sort of inside the Beltway obsession, but since one of the main terrorist targets was the the Pentagon, the rest of the country hardly sees it as a strange fixation. Like it or not, the entire nation has finally begun to articulate questions that should have been asked months ago.

Thousands of members of the general public died on 9-11 and none of them had the option of hopping on Air Force One to light out for the Great Plains like you. Your security has been stepped up since that awful day. The rest of us must walk into airports and office buildings and drive across bridges and through tunnels and wonder if your terror warnings are serious or just your latest attempts to turn the horror of last September to further political advantage.

If there is another terror attack, it's the general public that will most likely do the bleeding and the dying. So we have a right to know exactly what went on, what went wrong and what is being done about it. We also need to know why any and all investigatory conclusions are reached. No amount of bluster from you should be permitted to stop this crucial examination.

Your suggestion that questioning those who were either ignored or ignorant in the intelligence community surrounding 9-11 could compromise our safety by compromising their ability to ward off future attacks, is just your latest and most pitiful attempt to exploit this crisis by threatening the American people.

Judging by Kaiser Ashcroft's recent abject refusal to unequivocally declare that Coleen Rowley will not face on-the-job retribution for her whistle-blowing, I doubt she will be pulled away from any crucial duties to tell Congress her story. And considering the story she has to tell, the American people will be a whole hell of a lot safer with her incompetent superiors, including the 700 Club lounge-singer wannabe Ashcroft, in on the carpet rather than continuing to perform duties for which they have already demonstrated a pronounced incompetence.

And by the way, we also see through your payoff to the FBI for its recent work as a administration scapegoat. Despite Robert Mueller's acknowledgment that his organization dropped the 9-11 ball: FBI officials who blew it got promotions, the bureau will receive a huge increase in funds and almost any constraints against its use of police-state tactics are now history. It just goes to show you that when you take the fall for the Court-appointed Bush Administration, you land somewhere soft.

The US intelligence community's 9-11 impotence can be traced directly to its unwieldiness but what is your proposed remedy? Engorge it with billions of dollars and bloat the bureaucracy so that there will be that many more chains of command to use as downward conduits for blame the next time the system fails miserably. Your so-called intelligence "reform" is nothing more than a make-work program for authoritarians. A proper investigation will make this clear to all but the terminally nationalistic. We need to get to the bottom of all this stuff because our lives and lives in some sixty countries are now threatened by the perpetual and unwinnable war you have declared against a tactic that crazed and desperate people will always keep in their arsenal. Was it not crazed and desperate of you to terrorize America in the week prior to Memorial Day with bogus terror alerts? It's obvious that they were nothing more than political flares meant to sidetrack us from the trail of your incompetence. How many 9-11 survivors were too traumatized to visit cemeteries as a result of your cold-hearted assault on their emotional well-being? How reprehensible of you to employ such a tactic at such a time. Many of us knew what you were up to but we were helpless to stop you. That's how it is with terrorism, lunatics just can't be dissuaded from it.

The polar ice-cap will melt long before terrorism is eradicated. OK, considering your environmental policies, I could have chosen a better example. The point is that your cynical attempt to tell us that we can't waste our authoritarian resources at this moment because we might be attacked is hogwash. Everyone, everywhere sees through this. You want to limit the investigation because you know it could very well expose your purported leadership as lazy, incompetent, cynical, self-serving and corrupt. So you threaten us with our very lives in an attempt to minimize your embarrassment.

Well get this straight you vapid, petty, shifty little man: we are not going to be distracted. If you manage to sidetrack contemporary inquiries, history will hunt you down and fillet the corrupt collection of fixers, buck-passers and thugs that make up the sorry excuse for an executive branch you have foisted upon us.

Stupidity and arrogance are a lethal combination and you, George W. Bush, have been given a family-sized portion of both. Your old man, who at least was elected, was sent packing by an electorate that grew tired of his propensity for baring his fangs whenever he was held even mildly accountable for the mess he and Ronald Reagan had created. This fall you will see the first true indication about how much the American people believe in you. I think you're in for a shock. If and when the opposition party gains full control of both houses of the legislature, you and your bully pulpit will be rendered fully incapable of keeping our elected representatives from carefully examining the most pressing issue of our time. It can't come a minute too soon.

Sincerely,

Barry Crimmins

© 2002 Barry Crimmins

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