"Keeping Us Safe" Gets A Failing Grade

When George Bush accepted his party's nomination for re-election last September he said:

"This moment in the life of our country will be remembered," he told the delegates from a podium at the center of Madison Square Garden. "Generations will know if we kept our faith and kept our word. Generations will know if we seized this moment and used it to build a future of safety and peace. The freedom of many, and the future security of our nation, now depend on us."

...

"I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people."

Ah, those were the days, when Bush's approval rating was at 54%.

Today, with an approval rating that has sunk to 38% in the latest Gallop Poll released Nov 17th, just how well have Bush and his fearmongering VP in hiding, Cheney, done in their pledge to protect us?

In a word, badly.

The September 11 Commission, now organized as a watchdog group called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project released a report card Monday about how well this administration has been doing. There are enough D's and F's there to require this administration redo a term - but thankfully that won't be necessary.

Let's not forget this is a bi-partisan group passing judgement. In a prepared statement co-Chairs Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote:

Some of these failures are shocking. Four years after 9/11:

-- It is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis.
-- It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on the terrorist watchlist.
-- It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending, not risk.

We are frustrated by the lack of urgency about fixing these problems.

The irony is that this administration, and this president in particular, continue to try to convince America we are safer today than we were five years ago. This in face of the growing turmoil in Iraq, that is increasingly looking like it will lead to an Iraqi civil war that could spill over and affect the entire region, and that is becoming a melting pot for anti-American radicalism, while on the home front we have progressed little and neglected obvious weak points in the nation's infrastructure that could become easy targets for terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately it seems that Bush's commitment to our safety was merely lip service to Americans during an election campaign, and over the next year we shouldn't expect the Republican dominated Congress to pay much attention to the matter, as incumbents coming up for re-elections of their own focus on sound bites and photo opportunities, rather than real action and leadership.

Cross-posted at On The Road To 2008.