The buck finds a rest stop
"Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed
you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn't matter, because we
failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for
your understanding and for your forgiveness."
I haven't yet even seen the video, and I'm way behind in my reading so I
don't really know what people are saying out there about Richard Clarke's
extraordinary testimony yesterday before the 9/11 Commission. But just
reading those words in newspaper reports made me think that the words of
the former head of counterterrorism will go down as one of those defining
moments in American public life, like the Army-McCarthy hearings' "Have you
no decency, sir, at long last" or the Watergate hearings' "What did the
president know and when did he know it?"
Because Clarke's words exposed a deep emotional vacuum in the Bush
administration's handling of 9/11. Bush and his team won widespread acclaim
for their bullhorn-toting, Bible-waving, smart-bomb-dropping reaction to
the terror attacks. And each of those responses had its place, accomplished
something in the long process of coming to terms with the death and
destruction of that day. But the Bush approach, with its macho swagger
punctuated by interludes of lower-lip-biting moments of silence for our
collective loss, has never fully satisfied the national psyche.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't recall a single
instance when a leading Bush official -- someone on the order of a cabinet
secretary or above -- looked the American people in the eye and either
apologized or admitted error. They don't know how to do it. Admitting
mistakes is not in their playbook. Apologies are for wimps and Democrats.
Now Clarke, neither wimp nor Democrat, has done both these things, in
simple, direct words -- words that, I think, the 9/11 family members and
their wider network of friends, relations and sympathizers, a circle that
ripples out to include just about all of us, have wanted and needed to hear
from someone in a position of responsibility for so long. By
uttering these words, Clarke indirectly but boldly underscored their
absence from our government's vocabulary in the entire two-and-a-half-year
span of days since 9/11. His action placed Bush's failure in stark relief.
Further, it reminded us that despite the incomparable magnitude of the 9/11
attacks, not a single Bush administration official has resigned, or been
asked to resign, to take responsibility for what happened.
It was fear of just such a moment, I think, that led Bush to oppose the
formation of a 9/11 commission in the first place. And it is the resonance
of the moment with so many other Bush failures that gives it its power.
This is an administration that (as Josh Marshall has eloquently
argued) does not know how to say "This was our fault." I'm not saying
we can or should blame 9/11 on Bush. But the Bush administration's habit of
finger-pointing -- whether talking about the stagnant economy (not the
fault of our insane tax policies!), the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq (not the fault of our blindered policy-making!) or any
other issue of national significance over the past four years -- has
escalated from a bad habit into a scandal. The stonewalling of
responsibility has made it impossible for the nation to figure out what
went wrong and make the changes we need to insure it never happens again.
Someone in the executive branch had to stoop down, pick up the famous Harry Truman
motto that Bush never seems to have heard, and take its words to heart.
That it took a resigned official to do so, and that his doing so evoked an
extraordinary barrage of personal assault from the vice president and other
Bush officials, is one last stinging reminder that, in the Bush
administration, no one's desk bears a "the buck stops here" plaque.
Yesterday, Richard Clarke finally stopped the buck.
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