I just called Tom Daschle an idiot on national TV!

[Undertoad]

I assume this was the forum you were looking for when you posted in IotD? (I deleted that thread, you can thank me later, and all I can say is: friends, don't drink and post...)

I agree that Daschle is an idiot. Dick Gephardt too. There is a time to act politically, and a time to drop all that crap and just do the right thing.

Anyone who has read a Clancy book knows: there is intelligence gathering, and then there is intelligence analysis. What we are hearing is that the people doing the gathering did their job, and the people doing the analysis did not. It doesn't matter if the President was briefed with gathered intelligence; he can't possibly act on gathered intelligence, nor would we want him to. It only matters if he didn't act on heavily analyzed intelligence.

Well now wait a minute. It's easy to say the analysts didn't do their job, but the analysis is the hard part. It's easy to see how the facts fit together after the event, extremely difficult to see before the event. All of the events of history are preceded by warnings that we can see bright as day, but we still can't predict the future.

Now we see that the Senate intelligence committee got the same sorts of warnings, and those pols didn't put two and two together either, even as Feinstein felt it was interesting enough information to repeat on national TV in the summer of '01.

Now the idiot bit. I'm sure that Daschle and Gephardt understand that this is not over and that the US remains likely to be hit with continued terrorist activity. By echoing the "what did the president know and when did he know it" phrase, Gephardt is using language to suggest that this has reached the level of scandal, without coming right out and saying it's scandalous. If Gephardt says it's scandalous, then the problem sticks to him if it isn't. His wording was calculated.

The public understood immediately that this was a political action; 70% of those polled said it was political, which is a virtual landslide when people are asked politically-loaded questions. But the press didn't; on a slow news cycle, they pretty much decided to play it like it was a big deal.

The end result is that everyone -- the pres, congress, reporters, the public -- took time out to address this as if it was a scandal. And THAT, in turn, means that all the eyes were off the prize: the CONTINING THREAT. Because while the last attack can't be prevented, the next one might be, and introducing partisan politics and fake scandal is not really a good way to address that one.