Graciously, President Obama extended an invitation to former President Bush to attend and participate a ceremony at Ground Zero, the former sight of the Two Towers, this Thursday. Yet for some odd reason, the man who once stood atop a heaping pile of twisted metal and dead bodies with a bullhorn pressed to his lips shortly after the attacks by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2011 has chosen to reject that invitation.
I wonder why? I mean Bush looked so defiant and Presidential back in the day, he even had New Yorkers cheering him:
Maybe it he declined for the reasons stated by his spokesperson. What do you think?
“President Bush will not be in attendance on Thursday,” said his spokesman, David Sherzer. “He appreciated the invite, but has chosen in his post-presidency to remain largely out of the spotlight. He continues to celebrate with Americans this important victory in the war on terror.”
Or maybe he was afraid of being booed by New Yorkers. This was the man, after all, who said on Septemeber 17, 2001 that he would get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Yet only a few months later, after he failed to capture of kill Bin Laden at Tora Bora, in large part because he allowed Afghanistan forces and not American troops to fight that battle said this of Osama bin Laden:
“I don’t spend that much time on him.” Truer words were never spoken. Bush and Cheney were never concerned about Osama bin Laden. They cared about invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Hell, Bush was planning to attack Iraq before 9/11 ever happened according to his first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill:
The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News’ 60 Minutes.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.
Osama bin Laden was never more than a convenient excuse for Bush to invade Iraq by lying that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were allies. And Bush sure ran with that opportunity. He lied us into a war in Iraq and then he used the threat of another terrorist attack by Al Qaeda to marginalize his critics on Iraq and win elections by denouncing his opponents as soft on terrorism. Remember this little comment by Dick Cheney in 2004 during the campaign against John Kerry?
Vice President Dick Cheney says the United States will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on Election Day, suggesting Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.
“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.
And I remember this GOP ad against Democrats in 2006 named “These are the Stakes.” I cannot recall a more egregious exploitation of American’s fears regarding Al Qaeda and 9/11 than this desperate ad that was produced by the RNC to make people forget all the missteps, incompetence, corruption and outright lies of George W. Bush (and cronies) regarding his self-proclaimed War on Terror:
Hell, Bush never wanted to eliminate Osama bin Laden. He was too valuable to kill. Bush and the Republicans needed him alive and well sitting in his Pakistani mansion. Bush had no incentive to make the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, his favorite bogeyman with whom to scare the American people, a priority.
That’s just my opinion, but I suspect that many New Yorkers, the same people the Bush administration lied to about the dangers of the toxic air around Ground Zero immediately after the attacks, would agree with me. They would not take kindly to seeing the man who failed them time and again, and who exploited their tragedy for political gain, standing beside President Obama, the man who followed through on his promise to make getting Osama bin Laden a top priority, at Ground Zero.
Bush is a coward. If he really believed he is entitled to share the credit for Osama bin Laden’s demise, he would be there tomorrow, standing proudly in unison with the President and all of the people of New York. The fact that he has declined to do so speaks volumes.
