I didn't watch any national news tonight--or local, for that matter. So I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that in all the remembrances and stories of memorials, analysis of what has and hasn't changed in our country and the world, and sober discussion of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, few if any people focused on the fact that four years after the Towers fell, Osama bin Laden remains at large.
For a group of people so supposedly bound up with honor and martial pride, so praiseful of war and violence, doesn't it seem odd that more right-wingers aren't rabid with fury over the fact that bin Laden wasn't made to answer for his crimes? That the substitute in terms of militaristic self-gratification has gone so badly awry is almost like injury added to insult.
Michael Tomasky
issues a reminder in the
American Prospect:
[E]ven the disaster Bush has created in Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night falls on September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for 1,461 days.
America vanquished world fascism in less time: We obtained Germany's surrender in 1,243 days, Japan's in 1,365.
...
Just imagine bin Laden having been at large this long in President Al Gore's administration. In fact, it's impossible to imagine, because President Gore, under such circumstances, wouldn't have lasted this long. You probably didn't know, until you read this column, the number of days bin Laden has been at large. But I assure you that if Gore had been president, you and every American would have known, because the right would have seen to it that you knew, asking every day, "Where's Osama?" If Gore hadn't been impeached, it's doubtful he'd have survived a re-election campaign, with Americans aghast at how weak and immoral a president had to be to permit those 2,700 deaths to go unavenged this long.
It was briefly a matter of debate in last year's presidential campaign whether or not the Bush administration "let bin Laden get away" in December 2001. Armando linked to the story in this week's Times magazine about what happened at Tora Bora that month. Bush, Cheney and General Tommy Franks said no; toward the end of the NYT story, the author notes that others, including the Pentagon's own investigators, say yes.
"We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped.
This is the Karl Rove signature move in a nutshell; leverage the media's tendency toward framing everything in terms of there being "two sides to the story," to muddy every issue. It's enough--indeed, it's seen as upholding some kind of journalistic principle--to present both sides, even if one side is utterly unsupported by the facts.
By the time the "truth" is reported (usually sotto voce, as was the case here), the circus has moved on and we're parsing "red state facts" and "blue state facts" on another topic: the administration's outing Valerie Plame, or whether the feds or state and local officials are primarily to blame for the tragic response to Hurricane Katrina.
The administration's defenders and apologists have lately become very sensitive about "playing politics" in a time of national tragedy; perhaps getting absolutely nailed for transparent ineptitude has something to do with this change of heart. These were the same people who sold (and bought) photos of Bush on Air Force One, in his moment of pants-crapping cowardice, the Republican National Committee offered as gifts for generous donors.
As Tomasky implies, had history gone differently and a Democrat sat in the White House on September 11, 2001, it still would have been the Republican Party exploiting 9/11. They just would have been much more justified in doing so.