Treason

Members of the Radical Right have no problem using the "T" word when referring to Democrats, progressives, and other non-right-wing types. Indeed, extremist nutjob Ann Coulter actually called one of her books Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, and a columnist at the New York Post recently had no problem labeling the Democrats' anti-surge resolution as an act of treason.

Democrats and progressives, on the other hand, don't like to return the favor. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) pointed this out in a speech on the House floor last week:

Members of the other side have questioned our side and they've said "whose side are we on?" and "how can we say that we support the troops?" and that we're somehow unpatriotic. And I would just like to say that when the Republican Party and this president didn't send enough troops, we didn't call you unpatriotic, and when you sent our young soldiers over there without the body armor, we never call you unpatriotic, * * * and when they didn't send enough up-armored humvees, we never called anybody unpatriotic and now when the next batch goes over without the proper jammers or up-armored kits, we don't call you unpatriotic.

Now we've called you incompetent -- we said you're incapable and we said you were derelict in your oversight responsibility -- but never, Mr. Speaker, have we called anyone in this House unpatriotic.

Congressman Ryan is right -- we never question the other side's patriotism, and I think we should start doing so. Sure, I understand that it is possible to be profoundly incompetent without being a traitor, but how incompetent can one group of people be? And I'm not talking about just the Iraq Debacle.

BushCo basically let bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. As Frank Rich wrote in The Greatest Story Ever Sold:

* * * [S]ources would repeatedly corroborate the [Washington Post's] initial report of the disastrous failure to nab bin Laden in Tora Bora that December, culminating with Gary Berntsen, a top CIA commander on the ground at the time and a leader in the brilliant campaign that undid the Taliban in Afghanistan. In his memoir Jawbreaker, published in 2005, Berntsen, a Bush loyalist, tells of how his teams found bin Laden and his remaining entourage in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistani border and begged Centcom for 800 U.S. Army Rangers to "block a possible Al-Qaeda escape into Pakistan." But instead he was ignored by Franks and the Pentagon, who inexplicably entrusted the job instead to Afghan warlords with agendas of their own. Bin Laden effortlessly slipped away while Berntsen fumed.

I wish I could tell you that the disaster at Tora Bora is the only example of Bush allowing enemies of America to escape, but it isn't (see here and here).

It would be one thing if members of the Bush Regime learned their lesson from what happened -- or, should I say, didn't happen -- at Tora Bora, but that clearly has not occurred. This is from today's New York Times:

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan. * * *

All this is happening merely as a result of BushCo incompetence? I'm sorry, but nobody is that stupid.

I think the time has come for Americans to consider the possibility that Bush and his people don't want to stop Al Qaeda or capture bin Laden. They've certainly done a great job at not doing either.

What do you call it again when you provide aid and comfort to the enemy?