Dems Accuse Bush Of Politicizing 9/11

By politicizing 9/11. This is kind of ridiculous on the part of the Democrats. The usual suspects swoop to a microphone with the usual comments. Some people did not like his speech, I thought it was pretty good. But it was hardly what the Democrats are calling it either.

“The president was not making partisan remarks,” Tony Snow, the chief White House spokesman, said at a briefing. He said the president’s address, marking the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, was “not a speech designed to single anyone out for partisan reasons.”

Mr. Snow was responding to questions about Democrats’ response to the 17-minute speech in which Mr. Bush envisioned a fight to the finish against terrorists, and said that “a struggle for civilization” would be decided in part by the course of the war in Iraq.

Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Charles E. Schumer of New York, who heads the Democrats’ Senate campaign drive, denounced Mr. Bush’s speech almost immediately.

Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Bush “should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning” to justify his Iraq policy, while Mr. Schumer said, “You do not commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 by politicizing it.”

And Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, sharply criticized Mr. Bush today. “On the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, President Bush continued to try to justify the invasion of Iraq by drawing nonexistent links to the 9/11 attacks,” Ms. Pelosi said. “To try to make partisan gain out of such tragedy dishonors all those we lost on Sept. 11.”

The White House, correctly, points out that the terrorists themselves are calling Iraq the central front in the war and that an American withdrawal from there would be a disastrous defeat.

In rejecting Democratic criticism today, Mr. Snow said Mr. Bush could hardly have avoided talking about Iraq. If he had, Mr. Snow said, Americans would have been entitled to wonder, “What is he doing?” Moreover, Mr. Snow said, terrorists themselves now agree with the president that Iraq is indeed the central front in the war on terror.

Osama bid Laden himself has said that “victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America’s defeat and disgrace forever,” Mr. Snow said at a second briefing this afternoon. “We are in Iraq. It is now seen as the central focal point of the war on terror by the very people who mounted Sept. 11.”

This is what the people on the left simply do not appear to care about. This would be a disaster for the country – it would not be a political blow to Bush alone. It would cripple the US. We have got to stop this insane level of disarray we are projecting. There are ways to disagree with policy without appearing this bitter and this bitterly split.