Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Petty: The War on Terrorism has completely degraded into partisan bickering in this country. I don’t know whether it’s just because it’s an election year, but all this could turn out to be a huge distraction to the task at hand.

Now Richard Clarke’s accusations are bringing out the worst in both parties. Liberals are accusing Bush of lying and are calling for his impeachment. Conservatives are calling Clarke, who was appointed by Reagan, a partisan Clintonite and are trying to discredit everything he has to say.

Of course, the media is overblowing every aspect, fanning the flames of sensationalism. And Clarke is as guilty of the hype as much as the other parties. He’s trying to tar and feather Bush by painting him as obsessed with Iraq to such an extent that he ignored a clear and present danger in Al Qaeda, which allowed for the 9/11 attacks.

The battleground for these political attacks is the bipartisan 9/11 commission, which is desperately trying to figure out what has gone wrong in hopes of preventing a similar attack from occuring.

Now commission members are finding that both Bush and Clinton overlooked Al Qaeda. The verdict is, mistakes were made. Let’s not repeat the same mistakes again.

P.S. I’m covering a conference out of town for the next couple days. So I won’t be near my computer much for blog duties. And the computer I’m using doesn’t have spell check (!).