A significant portion of the Republican National Convention in 2004
was given over to turning Sept. 11 into the backdrop for the Bush
reelection campaign.

And on Tuesday, there was Bush's truly astonishing address to the
Military Officers Association of America.

Having not talked much about Osama bin Laden for years, Bush couldn't
stop talking about him.

By my count, bin Laden got 17 mentions.

Bush touted bin Laden's dream of a "caliphate" that "would be a
totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim
lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and
Southeast Asia."

Building up the theoretical threat of bin Laden's "radical empire" is
a nifty way to shift attention away from the questions on the minds of
most voters.

What will this administration do to fix its flawed and terribly
executed policy in Iraq?

And if bin Laden is the threat after all, what exactly are we doing in
Iraq?

And why have we allowed the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate?

The president has no good answers, so he wants to lift the whole
debate to a misty, ideological plane where he can bunch bin Laden with
Hitler and Lenin as totalitarian threats.

A president who kept quiet about bin Laden when doing so served his
political purposes now revives him rhetorically just before the
anniversary of Sept. 11, at a moment when his party is in grave
jeopardy in another election.


From The Washington Post, 9/8/06:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR200609070161
9.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Vanished Towers, Vanished Leadership

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, September 8, 2006; Page A17


The events of Sept. 11, 2001, are personal to every American.

The day was not about politics or partisanship or elections.

That's why the country, divided more or less 50-50 on political
matters the day before the terrorist attacks, immediately drew
together in sorrow, solidarity and determination.

The rest of the world stood with us.

Five years later, you look at the rancid state of our politics, the
decline in America's standing in the world and the behavior of our
national leadership, and you want to shed tears for your nation.

This year, so much of what's being said about the events of Sept. 11
is about the political survival of the Bush administration.

Our household's personal ties to that day pass through a neighborhood
arrayed along the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway, Queens, where my
mother-in-law and two of my wife's brothers live.

That middle-class community is the home of many firefighters, police
officers and mid-level employees of companies that happened to be
housed in the World Trade Center buildings.

In Rockaway, terrorism is not an abstraction.

Something missing in your skyline, we learned, can be as powerful a
presence as something that's actually there.

My kids always knew we were about to get to Grandma's house when we
crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from Staten Island to Brooklyn.

One of them would inevitably shout out, "The Twin Towers!"

Whenever we cross that bridge now, the silence in the car and the
absence of those buildings are a memorial to a day of pain and
outrage.

Because Sept. 11 was experienced so personally, divisions melted.

In our household my wife and I instructed our kids that all of us
should wish President Bush well and hope for his success.

Surely something like this happened in millions of other homes where
Bush was not exactly a political hero.

______________________________________________________

After having stolen the 2000 election, it didn't take folks much time
to see what George W. Bush was really about.

Harry