If a Democrat had been in the White House and belatedly disclosed that his or her administration had suppressed the fact that the intelligence community had issued warnings about Al Qaeda, guess who would be screeching their lungs out about it?
Certainly the most apoplectic screechers would include people such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
I fear that the Democrats won’t summon the courage to solve the two most knotty problems that I see facing the U.S.–namely, changing our country’s continued oil dependence and settling the Israel-Palestine situation.
To their credit, however, I believe that if the Democrats had won the election by a razor-thin margin, they would not have pushed their party’s most extreme positions.
Nor would they have installed a Byzantine degree of secrecy.
Nor, “in a time of war,” would the Democrats have launched the counterintuitive policy of pointing fingers at North Korea, Iran, Cuba, etc.
In a time of war, you focus on that war.
In a time of war, you do not make additional enemies.
Or, in the case of Iran, you do not deliver a setback to a budding movement to fight off the mullahs.
I can only hope that the Democrats can find a presidential candidate who has solid credentials in military and foreign policy matters.
A presidential candidate whom Americans can trust to be a solid commander in chief in these troubled times.
And a presidential candidate who can persuade Americans that as a matter of patriotic duty, we have to come to grips with oil dependence.
The Tribune’s suggestion of gradually increasing gas taxes, painful as it undoubtedly would be–perhaps most especially for the working poor–seems to be on target.
The time has come to throw out the ideologues and restore balance, pragmatism and a bit of citizen-sacrifice (in the case of oil) to U.S. policy.
The Bush administration gets a big F in all those categories. I can only hope that the Democrats can produce a candidate who scores better in these categories.
