Hindsight is 20/20

This whole Richard Clarke-9/11 commission thing irritates me. Yes, we probably could have done something earlier, yes we should have been more aggressive against Al Qaeda earlier, no we didn't, and no we weren't. Fine. But looking at it now, 3 years after the fact, is neither important nor useful.

The fact of the matter is that everyone makes mistakes. Perhaps the current administration was too lax before 9/11, but they were no worse than the administration before them (something which, interestingly, Richard Clarke has also pointed out, though the media is trying to pin this squarely on Bush). Everyone at every level of government ignored this problem, and as such everyone -- including the commission members themselves -- bears some responsibility for it.

So what's the practical upshot of this? Nothing, really. Conspiracy theories aside, no one really believes that Bush would have let 9/11 happen had he known about it. He wants to be a two-term president, as all presidents want, and that would have been suicide. I'm not sure I'd called Bush the brightest bulb in the pack, but he's not a total dimwit, and he is politically savvy.

So what's the point of this? The only one I can think of is to publically blast Bush for something important during an election year. And in that context, it doesn't surprise me at all that one of the commission members was... John Kerry.