The Panic Defense

Richard Clarke has a Washington Post op-ed piece, which you can read if you want, debunking the Bush Administration typical defense about how they did what they did in the aftermath of 9/11 due to the advanced state of terror which was induced by that event. Notably, he doesn't say they weren't freaked out, he merely says they should not have been surprised because he had been warning them that something like that was going to happen.

When I was in the Navy, sometimes bad things would happen at sea. Once in a while a "really bad thing" would happen. When it did, everyone looked to the Captain. What you do not want, in circumstances like that, is to see the captain freaking out completely, flinging his hat on the deck, stomping on it and screaming, "Oh shit, we're all going to die."

What surprises me about the Bush Administration's "panic defense" of saying that they did all of these bad things because they were frightened out of their wits is not the ineffectiveness of the defense, but that they would make it at all. When I react badly, I usually try to kind of play it down; I just never brag about it. Even my cat, when she makes a jump for the railing and misses, tries to pretend that it didn't happen. The Bush people actually brag about how witlessly terrorized they were by that event, so much so that the non-functionality of their brains lasted for years.

We now know that, worst president or not, Bush was certainly the most gutless president in the history of this nation; and the one with the most cowardly staff ever.

In the Navy we didn't elect our Captains. Perhaps it's a good thing we didn't or we might have wound up electing some asshat from Yale who, in an emergency, would be flinging his hat on the deck and screaming, "Oh shit, we're all going to die."