TheAgitator.com
Least Surprising News of the Week
Friday, August 21st, 2009Not that the fact that it isn’t surprising makes it any less offensive.
In his new book, the first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, accuses top aides to President George W. Bush of pressing him to raise the terror alert level to influence the 2004 presidential election.
Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, says that he refused the entreaty just before the election from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a summary of the book from publisher Thomas Dunne Books.
“After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector,” Ridge, who resigned soon after the election where Bush defeated Democrat John F. Kerry, writes…
I’ll defer to my boss’s take on this one:
You’re a true patriot, Tom Ridge. When faced with senior administration officials deliberately trying to scare the crap out of the American people to win an election–a tar-and-featherable offense, at minimum–not only did you decide to eventually quit some day, you rushed out and told citizens about their duplicitous leaders in just five short years! For profit!
A banal point to remember, but foundational: Government is materially incentivized to frighten you, about everything. Power–surprise!–corrupts, no matter which set of angels happens to be exercising it this year. Which is why some of us don’t gladly give the stuff over to Washington, D.C.
Yep. That’s certainly true of the Bush administration’s exploitative terrorism scaremongering. But it also only took a few months before the Obama administration started telling us that unless Congress quickly passed his massive recovery plan without debate or scrutiny, we’d all be standing in breadlines.
I’d also add that loyalty is way overrated, especially in Washington. If Ridge is telling the truth now—and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that he is—he’s a coward for not resigning when he should have. It’s a twisted little burgh, D.C., where devotion to party and president trump integrity.
MORE: Loren points out in the comments that Ridge resigned a month after this incident took place. That’s a fair point. Ridge also went public with his disputes over the terror alert system in 2005. I still think it’s fair to criticize him for waiting five years and until Bush is out of office to make the more serious allegation–that the alerts were an attempt to influence the election. But that said, the post above is too hard on Ridge.
Ridge submitted his resignation on November 30, 2004, almost exactly a month after this incident. He stayed in the office through the inauguration.
Is that not fast enough? When “should” he have resigned?
this shit keeps happening and people keep supporting the weasels who repeatedly screw us over… we’re like a country of abused spouses- ‘I know the promises were broken, but this time…’
they can all kiss my ass.
Radley I don’t think that post is to hard on him, because even if it’s a month later, a real civil servant would have resigned immediately and call bullsh*t on the administration almost immediately. Instead he waited until the election was over to preserve the Republican grip on DC. I’m not saying if he comes out with this story on October 29th 2004 that the election changes, but it would have been more interesting and ethical.
Here is another one of those Bushies who exaggerates and lies beyond reason. No wonder more young people tune into Jon Steart, he is the only one who asks pertinent questions.
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/21/tds/
I agree with Frank Herbert rather than Lord Acton. It’s not that power corrupts, but rather that it inevitably attracts those that are corrupt or corruptible. It should therefore come as little surprise that loyalty and profit should trump truth and justice.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it.
– Frank Herbert Chapterhouse: Dune
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
– Frank Herbert Chapterhouse: Dune
I think this applies equally well to the abuse of police power.
I’d also add that loyalty is way overrated, especially in Washington.
And everywhere else. That “blue code of silence” that gives us so much trouble is loyalty.
He should have resigned immediately and called BS on it. THAT would have been an interesting election.
This smells like either old news or no news. Who cares anymore? The book will probably sell a few thousand copies at a loss.
I know bashing Bush has been fun but shouldn’t it be over already? I’m not defending Bush, just saying that it is so 2008.
Nothing will be changed by bashing Bush anymore. He is gone! He is only a problem for a few blocks in Dallas.
I’m tired of Bush/Cheney/Rove being the boogeyman. They are old hat and gone already.
“I still think it’s fair to criticize him for waiting five years and until Bush is out of office to make the more spurious allegation.”
I’m certain you didn’t mean “spurious” there, but it is funny.
(note: exculpatory proclamations by politicians are probably not true. Just sayin’)
Stephen –
I agree that we should be moving on, but that administration left us with a huge pile of sh*t, like the Patriot Act, Medicare Expansion, appointing of idiots at Treasury and Fed, so the man is indeed gone, but his legacy lives on everyday. If anything, the precedent set by the last administration emboldened this administration to do things like takeover banks, auto companies, bailout financial institutions.
I would argue he’s a coward for not having blown the whistle on the whole deal when it happened. After all, what’s the effect of resigning? It may have protected himself and assuaged his guilty conscience, but it didn’t stop the Bush administration from effectuating its plan.
Look at it this way. Let’s say I rob a bank with two buddies. During the robbery, the ringleader asks me to shoot the clerk. I decide that’s wrong, so I leave, after which the other accomplice shoots the clerk. If I don’t immediately call the police and inform them of the ongoing robbery, I’m still liable for felony murder.
Now I’ll admit that it would’ve taken balls of steel to come forward with such allegations against a sitting president, so perhaps “coward” is too strong of a word. And I think the bigger focus should be on the accusations themselves rather than how they reflect on Ridge. But I think you can still take Ridge to task for attempting to save his own hide while hanging the American people out to dry (which, come to think of it, may be the actual definition of a politician).
Radley: I usually try to restrain myself from an incessant habit of grammatical nitpicking (although I am available for children’s parties). However, in your next-to-final sentence you probably mean to say “serious” rather than “spurious.”
Oh, and Stephen…
This smells like either old news or no news. Who cares anymore?
I agree 100% with Ginger Dan’s response. The lesson here is that we need to be on alert for such behavior from subsequent administrations. Sadly, it will never occur to the Obama-fellating partisan hacks that the Democrats might be doing the exact same thing right now.
He wasn’t a coward for not blowing the whistle, and he didn’t refuse because he thought it was wrong. He refused because he thought Bush was going to lose the election and that he would be exposed for doing it, ending his political career. Attributing any political decision to anything other than self-interest is crazy.
This is aweful and repugnant, but do you really think this is something new? I figured that anyone with a brain knew this was happening, just as we know most politicians use whatever is happening as a political tool to manipulate voters.
Not new.
Clinton bombed people when he wanted to distract the nation from his own foibles.
Not acceptable either.
It’s always nice, when we get more evidence of the criminal actions of our former president and his admin, to see the wingers come out and play the false equivalence game.
Here’s Don Pardo to tell you what you’ve won.
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/21/bush-wh-figures-deny-express-puzzlement-over-ridge-allegations/
of course it is also possible that Ridge is lying now.
Lying to sell a book after your are ‘out of the game’ seems to be pretty common. Hard to know what, if anything, is true about anything in Washington …. other than what we all mostly agree on: “Government is bad …. mmmkay?”.
“I’m tired of Bush/Cheney/Rove being the boogeyman. They are old hat and gone already.”
Yikes. Disagreeing with the Democrats is one thing but while government power corrupts there is certainly a matter of degree involved. And the critique that’s important isn’t Ridge’s role in this, it’s journalism’s. Or rather, the way that anyone who works for the mainstream media so cravenly licks whatever boot gets put in front of it. 30 years ago, if someone had sniffed that Rove had accusations against a sitting president that they were manipulating terror warnings to sway elections, there would have been, you know, an investigation.
More disagreement:
http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/21/frances-townsend-tom-ridge-has-it-wrong/
This from Frances Townsend, who chaired the meeting in question.
I always thought the “terror level” was pure scare-the-rubes bullshit, anyway, but I’m keeping an open mind on this one.
Either Ridge was lying up until recently, or he’s lying now. Even the NYT calls B.S. on his claim, because until recently he flatly denied politics had anything to do with the threat warnings:
“Mr. Ridge provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion. Until now, he has denied politics played a role in threat levels. Asked by Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times if politics ever influenced decisions on threat warnings, he volunteered to take a lie-detector test. “Wire me up,” Mr. Ridge said, according to Mr. Lichtblau’s book, “Bush’s Law.” “Not a chance. Politics played no part.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21ridge.html?_r=2&hp
“But that said, the post above is too hard on Ridge.”
No, I think you had it right the first time. Really.
If he truly believed the pressure to raise the alert was politically motivated, he had an obligation to resign immediately and shout it from the highest rooftops. That is some seriously evil shit.
J sub d, it’s halfway through 2009, and in any political discussion someone will throw out a “But…Clinton!”
I’m with the doubters here. If we believe his version of this, then it all happened at one meeting. How much pressure can someone feel from one meeting? Plus, like everyone else has pointed out, someone writing their memoir usually tries to make themselves look good, hardly surprising.
I’m not surprised this came out eventually. The little I recall from Ridge’s governorship of P.A. was that he was pretty decent.
Granted, he was no shining beacon for liberty or anything, but as far as P.A. politicians go, he wasn’t half bad. During his tenure with the Bush administration, I recall more than once thinking, “is the the same Tom Ridge?”
And as for Ridge not resigning immediately, do recall that Bush was still pretty popular at the time and after seeing what the GOP did to Paul O’Neill, I’m sure Ridge was trying to salvage a future*.
*Assume the usual caveats about politicians and their douchbaggery…
This smells like either old news or no news. Who cares anymore? The book will probably sell a few thousand copies at a loss.
I know bashing Bush has been fun but shouldn’t it be over already? I’m not defending Bush, just saying that it is so 2008.
Old news is also called “history”; learn from it, or be doomed to repeat it. I We have the advantage of hindsight- did any of the increased terror levels ever coincide with an actual threat? Go back and read the news regarding upping the terror threat levels, note that most are based off of “increased chatter”. Guess the chatter was actually from Bush admin officials.
#8 Stephen- “I’m tired of Bush/Cheney/Rove being the boogeyman. They are old hat and gone already.”
Except the more that comes out about their reign, the more criminal and corrupt it looks- and it looked pretty criminal and corrupt while it was going on to many of us. They left us with huge problems, and have only been out of power 8 months. Who knows what else is going to come up, but so far there have been no investigations or indictments for criminal acts, even though their appears to be lots of evidence of such.
I guess by your logic, if I rob a bank and don’t get caught at the time I can just tell the FBI when they eventually catch up with me “What’s the problem? I robbed that bank months ago, that is so last year!” I’m pretty sure I’d still be arrested.
One thing I don’t see in the comments is maybe Ridge should get a little bit of credit for not resigning immediately… which would have allowed the plan of falsely raising the threat level to go ahead, when they put in Temporary Yes Man #48,734. Maybe he felt that holding the position until after the election would forestall the attempt to influence the election, at least through the mechanism that he had been responsible for.
It doesn’t make the wait until 5 years later much better, but it is something to think about.
“In his new book, the first Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, accuses top aides to President George W. Bush of pressing him to raise the terror alert level to influence the 2004 presidential election.”
NOOOOO!!! (Clasping hands over ears) LA LA LA LA LA, I can’t hear you! Our government wouldn’t do this to us. Burn this book! It will encourage skepticism about the benevolence and competence of the federal government. The potential of the federal government to protect us from all risk (and ourselves) is limitless. Ezra Klein assured me that this is so ;) .
It is upsetting because terror alerts scare the public. This should have never been used to promote a political agenda.
I’d only add that using the threat of violence for political gain is, well, terrorism.
#31 Fishbane:
Excellent point!
Keith Olberman, to his credit, pointed that out last night while skewering the people that criticized him when he suggested that Bush and co. were manipulating terror warnings in 2004 to influence election results.
Just because someone says it, doesn’t make it true.
I’m with Stephen on this one.
Sydney Carton #22 is correct. There is no written evidence that Bush or Cheney asked for increased threat levels. There is no corroboration from other staff members. Tom Ridge stated, in public, years after he resigned, that threat levels were not determined by politics.
It seems quite plausible that Bush or Cheney would ask about threat levels during the election. Certainly, attacks on voting sites would be an effective terrorist tactic, and this was the first presidential election after 9/11/01. But, if there was no evidence of voting day attack planning, then the threat level would be unchanged (which was what happened).
As an aside, how would a higher terrorist threat level have helped Bush & Cheney in the 2004 election? It would indicate a failure to keep the nation safe. I can see only downsides from this. The Bush team was not comprised of geniuses, but it certainly wasn’t stupid enough to lower its election chances by manipulating DHS threat levels.
“I guess by your logic, if I rob a bank and don’t get caught at the time I can just tell the FBI when they eventually catch up with me “What’s the problem? I robbed that bank months ago, that is so last year!” I’m pretty sure I’d still be arrested.”
Not quite the way my logic works.
Do you really think any ex-president will ever be convicted of anything they did while in office?
If that starts happening, every president from here on would go to jail after they lose the office to the other team.
They will all pardon their predecessor because they are afraid of what might happen to themselves when they lose the office.
My logic says that nothing will ever happen to Bush/Cheney/Rove no matter how hard anyone tries so why bother?
I’ve only got a couple of years to go, unless the O throws the color coded system out entirely, before I win my bet with a friend that the alert level would never go below a ’3′ in the first 10 yrs of the program or during the programs lifetime if it didn’t make it to 10 yrs. Actually, I had bet that it would never in our lifetimes go below a 3 but we decided that if one of us had to croak first, then what was the point of the bet? So we decided on 10 yrs.
Wasn’t Ridge confronted about this sort of thing back in 04 and he promised that the terror alert code was not being politicized. I think he even offered to take a lie detector test or something like that.
And this is why you do NOT trust the government on national security issues. It’s not about this particular incident or this particular party, and it doesn’t mean that governments are always lying or mistaken about a national security issue. What it does mean is that when a government tells you something about a national security issue, you do not assume they are telling you the truth. Our founders realized that, which is why they created a limited government along three axes (separation of powers, Bill of Rights and federalism) but sadly I think that realization has been lost. Democrats worship the welfare state, Republicans worship an authoritarian executive and no one remembers that the Founders gave us a limited government precisely because politicians cannot be trusted with that kind of power.
#25 | Tokin42 | August 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I’m with the doubters here. If we believe his version of this, then it all happened at one meeting. How much pressure can someone feel from one meeting? Plus, like everyone else has pointed out, someone writing their memoir usually tries to make themselves look good, hardly surprising.
it all happened at one meeting.
Are you fucking stupid?
#39 | Cornellian | August 22nd, 2009 at 1:51 am
And this is why you do NOT trust the government on national security issues.
Well the U.S. all ready hired a private firm to ensure our national security, and they have done a bang up job.