Oranges and Apples
I don’t know if this latest selective Orange Alert is politically timed or not*. Sure, the intelligence has been there for four years, but the “four years in the making” spiel makes some sense, and it occurs to me that better political timing would be during Kerry’s speech.
Still, something pops into my head with the schmeraing of Dean. What he said:
It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics. And I suspect there’s some of both in it.
and
I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism.
Here’s where it gets rather wacky. These are being brandished as evocative of a previous statement from Dean:
WOODRUFF: It’s not the first time the former Vermont governor’s words have made waves. Remember what he said after U.S. forces in Iraq bagged the ace in the deck?
DEAN: We’re not safer today than we were before Saddam Hussein left.
A line that was slammed… and a line that was whole-heartedly true.
Lieberman, just as he did back then, is critical of Dean again:
I don’t think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.
About there being some of both of it (politics and reality), we move back to Tom Ridge:
But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror […]
Tom Ridge later lobbed the following criticism at himself:
We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.
…
* For what it’s worth, Bill Clinton just defended this on Bush’s part, saying “You can’t be too cynical.” Of course, he was once accused of “Wagging the Dog”, so sympathies on sympathies.