Tom Ridge and the Terror Alert of Doom

I have always tried to avoid the worst of anti-Bush hysteria, mainly because I thought well-intentioned, ideologically-driven incompetence was a much better explanation for what went on during that administration than cackling Evil Villainery. Besides, I've always thought that ranting on about the evilness of the principals and their imagined acts distracted from the evilness of the things they actually did do, which were no less evil just because they were motivated by negligence and stupidity. Banality of evil and all that.

And now we have this.

I never put any stock in the idea that anyone in the Bush administration would actually purposefully manipulate this country's national security apparatus to win an election, both because I discounted the whole cackling hand-rubbing image, and because while I knew they were dumb, I never thought anyone could be that dumb.

Well, almost no one.

As is the usual way of these things, we're hearing about it third or fourth hand from the second cousin of someone who read a draft of a book that looks an awful lot like a grindstone, by someone who has plenty of axes lined up and ready to go. So I don't think we can say what really happened yet.

For example:

"[Ridge says he was] pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over."

Key phrase there, and you don't know what to make of it until you read the book. Suffice to say we don't have all the facts yet.

Also,

"We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions," -- former WH CoS Andy Card

Which I buy, actually.

But that doesn't mean it didn't happen anyway. That's the kind of thing Cheney's office would have done just because someone told them not to.

"Of course we'll hit our own troops. But appearances must be maintained. Fire at will."

Still, grain of salt firmly in place, I'm tempted to give Ridge the benefit of the doubt. He always struck me as a good guy stuck with one of the most poorly-thought-out job descriptions in all of Washington, and that's saying something.

"Could you take responsibility for the security of the entire nation without any real authority? Knew you could. 'Preesh."

So I buy it, at least on the face of it. All that remains is to see who said what when, and exactly how bad it really was.

This never-ending stream of revelations about the Bush administration, each one confirming that not only as bad as we thought, but it was actually worse, does nothing to shake my faith in humanity. I didn't have that much to begin with. Humanity is capable of far worse; despite what some lulubirds shriek, we've never even scratched the surface of the Nazi or Stalinist kind of evil. But it has shaken my faith in this country. That we could have ever let things get so bad, that we're so slow to face what actually happened, and that we'll probably never hold anyone truly accountable... at least the Constitution held, and we changed governments. But it took so little for us to get scared out of our most basic principles, and to betray our better natures as a people.

-- The Prolix Wag
My faith in myself, of course, remains profoundly unshaken.