Court-appointed commander

People who said they were glad George Bush was leading the American response to terrorist attack are choking on their words. Recent events confirm that the founders knew what they were doing when they provided for the president to be chosen by the voters, as Al Gore was, and not the Supreme Court, as Bush was.

(Those founders were smart cookies. They didn't use jargon like "market-driven" in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence either. Bush says we won't stop squeezing the Cubans until they adopt "market-driven" reforms. Apparently they'll have to turn their power plants over to Enron. If Bush demands "faith-based" reforms, they'll have to take Jerry Falwell.)

We know now that the Bush administration received numerous warnings of impending terrorist attacks, some arriving almost on the eve of the Sept. 11 disaster, and did next to nothing. Well, it did slip word to John Ashcroft, our faith-based attorney general, and Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft. Faith has its limitations. When Bill Clinton got a warning in 1999, he ordered an attack on Osama Bin Laden's training camp. Congressional Republicans accused him of picking on Osama for political reasons. Trent Lott hadn't developed an interest in national unity at the time.

After the airplanes struck the towers, Bush spent the rest of the day darting around the country, maintaining distance from the crash sites, ostensibly on the recommendation of security advisers. Bush's press secretary defended this behavior by saying terrorists had targeted the presidential plane. This was a lie, it turns out. There was no such targeting, at least none that our government knew of. Anyway, an army of security advisers couldn't have kept President Clinton from Ground Zero, and indeed former President Clinton showed up there before Bush did.