Monday, February 02, 2004

Aimless Searching: I've got a bad feeling about this investigation into the intelligence failures and missing WMD.

If the intelligence community screwed up as badly as it appears, then we need to find out why and how so we can fix the problem. But unfortunately, I'm afraid this probe is only going to lead to partisan sniping. While it's always difficult to get our two parties to put the national good ahead of politics, there's an even bigger problem this year: We're about to elect a president.

Democrats are going to scrounge for every piece of dirt that ties Bush to the screw-up. Republicans are going to worry more about defending the president than figuring out what went wrong.

We saw the same thing happen immediately after 9/11. Democrats blew scant evidence out of proportion and accused Bush of knowing about the hijackings beforehand. Now Republicans are wary about launching an investigation to find out why we couldn't stop terror attacks from occurring. They know that any information, rightly or wrongly, will be used to implicate the president.

It's a shame that the political parties resort to this nonsense. It's up to the voters to send a message that we don't want politicians to look for ammunition. We want them to find answers.