Road to Perdition

 

There’s steel in the bones of aging Tom Kean, former Republican Governor of New Jersey and now President of Drew University. Unwilling to play patsy and with memories of commissions that never found answers, he has uttered the one acid-churning word this White House didn’t want to hear: subpoena.

 

As Chairman of the 9/11 Commission (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US) he is charged with completing his report by May 27, 2004. If his Commission fails to meet this statutory deadline, only Congress can approve an extension. The President initially opposed the setting up of the Commission. 

 

Every branch of government has been cooperating if on a slow and reluctant basis and access “has already been on a unique breadth and scale.”

 

Except for the Executive. 

 

“We’re not going to be satisfied until we get every document we need,” Kean warned fulfilling his threat to go public if the White House did not respond within a few weeks of the issuance of his Second Interim Report on September 23.

 

Kean wants to see the classified documents relating to a Presidential Daily Briefing in August 2001 which allegedly warned of possible Al Quada plane hijackings. These are highly sensitive documents and only a handful of people would normally see them.

 

“Looking backward to look forward,” Kean intends to be one of them and Bush intends to stonewall. When it comes to revelation, the Bush crowd knows the score.

 

As does Valerie Plame.

 

Outed to intimidate her husband (Ambassador Wilson) and other skeptics of the intelligence used to justify pre-emptive war, Plame feels betrayed by her own government. The President faked outrage almost two months after Novak’s column revealed she was a CIA agent.

 

The leak investigation is ongoing and we may soon know just how many people were actually betrayed.

 

In her book Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia Drury offers a concise characterization of Conservatism and Liberalism. She describes Traditional (Classic) Conservatism (which lamented the passing of the Middle Ages) as distinguished by “moderation, caution, fear of change, hierarchy, harmony, virtue, reciprocity, shared values and mutual concern. Feudal society came closest to actualizing this ideal." 

 

It was the “Liberal celebration of religious and economic freedom, competition, social mobility and individualism that replaced the Medieval Order” that gave birth to classic conservatism.

 

Liberalism represented Modernity. Conservatism represented nostalgia for the past. 

Bush is a self-declared compassionate conservative, which represents zilch.

Like WMD.

9:54:04 PM