Two Presidents at a Time

As the incoming president introduced his economic team and said there isn't "a minute to waste" in putting them to work, there was a brief, almost ghostly sighting of George W. Bush and Henry Paulson on cable news to promote the Citibank bailout, which Bush said he had discussed with Obama before it was announced.

"My commitment is to do what is required," Obama said at his Chicago news conference today. "President Bush has indicated that he has the same approach, the same attitude."

The President-Elect added that he has asked his new team to consult with Congress, the Bush Administration and the Federal Reserve on economic developments over the next two months.

So much for one president at a time, but the cooperative effort is not going to solve the main problems. The Citibank bailout was needed but drew immediate criticism from economists for being too large. too generous and without adequate supervision.

No matter how hard both Administrations try to deal with it, the two-presidents trap is going to be messy and expensive from now until January 20th.

Playing for Keeps in Pakistan

After seven years of Musharraf's shell game, the stakes are getting serious as American Special Ops forces are carrying out ground assaults against terrorist safe havens inside their borders without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.

The Bush Administration has finally done what critics, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have long been urging, but the public charade still goes on.

"Pakistan's "territorial integrity...will be defended at all cost and no external force is allowed to conduct operations...inside Pakistan," huffs Chief of Army Staff Gen. Parvez Kayani, who succeeded Pervez Musharraf after he stepped down.

"American officials," reports the New York Times, "say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

“"The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable,' said a senior American official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the missions. 'We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.'

"The new orders reflect concern about safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, as well as an American view that Pakistan lacks the will and ability to combat militants. They also illustrate lingering distrust of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies and a belief that some American operations had been compromised once Pakistanis were advised of the details."

But the deathbed conversion of the Bush Administration will leave the next president with the unsolved problem of protecting American interests without arousing enough hostility in Pakistan to topple the new government in favor of radical Islamists.

Now that Musharraf's three-card monte is over, the real diplomatic and military game can begin.

Dark Days for Blackwater

Everybody's favorite rent-a-goon service is going out of business in Iraq even before our troops leave.

After bad publicity and audits by the FBI and Homeland Security, Blackwater International's security business is down to about 30 percent of its revenue from a high of more than 50 percent and headed lower.

"If I could get it down to 2 percent or 1 percent, I would go there," the company president said this week, blaming the media for the decline and scolding them, "If you could get it right, we might stay in the business."

Score one for the journalism that exposed, among other abuses, the deadly hail of Blackwater gunfire that left 17 Iraqis dead and prompted the Baghdad government to revoke its license.

But shedding tears for the Bush Administration's favorite privatized murderers may be premature, according to Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater's Boswell, who points out that it is slithering into new areas of work, including spying, undercover operations against terrorists and drug dealers as well as "wrapping up work on its own armored vehicle, the Grizzly, as well as its Polar Airship 400, a surveillance blimp Blackwater wants to market to the Department of Homeland security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border."

Lou Dobbs will be thrilled.

Double Talk in the Mideast

After what must have been awkward conversations in Kabul with President Hamid Karzai, who he last week said "has not gotten out of the bunker and helped organize Afghanistan and government, the judiciary, police forces, in ways that would give people confidence," Barack Obama has arrived in Baghdad to consult with Nouri al-Maliki, who agrees with his timetable for American troop withdrawal--sort of, maybe, depending.

The Iraqi Prime Minister turned into a tower of jello this weekend at first publicly backing Obama's proposal and then, after a call from the US Embassy "to express concern and seek clarification," said he had been misinterpreted.

What Obama is learning first-hand on this trip will surely have less to do with Mideast policy than the serpentine course of politics in that part of the world, where friends, allies and enemies are subject to variable definitions at a moment's notice.

The national leaders he's meeting have to walk a line between six more months of dependence on the Bush Administration and the prospect that the money and military aid crucial to their political survival may depend on Obama's totally different mindset next year.

If Karzai and al-Maliki, to say nothing of American diplomats and military commanders, are running true to form, the potential new Commander-in-Chief is hearing a lot about how well we're doing now along with promises to do even better under policies 180 degrees from those now in place.

The chief benefit from Obama's "fact-finding" trip may be a glimmer of who in the cast of characters will give him some semblance of frankness amid all the double talk he will be hearing. It's a safe bet that there won't be much.

Trickle-Down in Iraq

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been walking the streets of Baghdad doling out cash to passersby. Compared to the American millions that have been paid out to tribal leaders or stolen by Iraqi politicians, al-Maliki's largesse is small potatoes, more like the street money paid out by local American pols on election day.

But the irony is that all this free money over there is flowing as American taxpayers prepare to spend billions here to rescue mortgage lenders from defaults of homeowners whose equity has plunged and who can't afford or are unwilling to make their monthly payments.

For the free enterprise enthusiasts of the Bush Administration, there is the huge embarrassment of a government bailout of what private markets are supposed to handle so efficiently and, beyond that, the continuing commitment of billions needed here to a seemingly endless Iraq adventure.

Before he took office, George W. Bush promised voters he would not get involved in nation-building elsewhere, but who have imagined that he would do just that as the nation he is supposed to preserve is crumbling all around him?

Bush Legacy: Dung and Dirty Air

In San Francisco, there is a new ballot initiative to name a sewage plant for him, but George W. Bush's farewell gift to the environment may be less solid--strong-arming the EPA to water down its opinion to the Supreme Court on pollutants in the air.

The original answer to a 2007 ruling requiring a report on greenhouse gases and health dangers has been in limbo for six months until the environmental agency removed sections that support regulation, including its judgment that curbing motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over three decades.

According to a senior official quoted by the New York Times, the original EPA report “showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy to reduce greenhouse gases. That’s not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can’t work.”

This week, the EPA will tell the Supreme Court that greenhouse gases are a complicated issue involving legal and economic issues that have yet to be resolved and, when Bush departs in January, his final gift will be a reminder of the cleaner air we could have been breathing if an Al Gore presidency hadn't been smothered in infancy by the Court with its 2000 Florida recount decision.

Scott McClellan's Sheltered Life

His belated discovery that the Bush Administration was a "permanent campaign" reflects the naiveté of a young man who started out managing his mother's campaign for Texas Comptroller and spent the rest of his working life inside the Bush bubble.

"A president-elect," Scott McClellan writes in his book, "should insist that those overseeing his transition into office learn about the permanent campaign--what it is, how it works, and the consequences of embracing it. A president-elect should also insist that his senior staff heed the same lessons.

"This could enable new administrations to avoid some of the pitfalls the Bush administration fell into, such as taking a massive campaign apparatus into the governing structure of the White House--a particularly dangerous mistake when there is no strong, counterbalancing force in place."

Say what? Some of us have been pointing out for years that Bush was the first American president who had no interest in running the country, just running for office.

Stooping to self-quotation, here is my post of November 4, 2006 headed "RIP: President Pitchman":

"The joy will go out of George W. Bush’s life on November 8, 2006. Whether or not Republicans hold on to Congress, Bush’s loss will be irreparable. He will no longer have what gives his existence meaning.

"Before Monicagate, Maureen Dowd nailed Bill Clinton as 'the only President who is still social-climbing,' a capsule for his combination of ambition, neediness and guile.

"Bush is the only President who never stopped campaigning and started governing.

"After November 7th, he will lose that. Karl Rove & Company may still provide reruns of his favorite milieu: hand-picked cheering crowds and brainless banners, catch phrases to demonize Democrats, self-satisfied smiles belaboring the obvious (9/11 changed the world) and twisting it to his needs (tear up the Constitution to get the terrorists).

"But the real thrill will be gone--persuading voters to part with their rights as easily as carnival barkers sold elixirs to clueless rubes. Bush will be left only with press conferences to smirk uncomfortably at reporters asking about real issues. As always, he will have no answers, only nostrums.

"R.I.P, President Pitchman."

Scott McClellan really should have gotten out of the White House more.

Mrs. Bhutto

As inured as we may be to the flow of bloody news from that part of the world, the death of Benazir Bhutto comes as a shocking reminder of how deeply involved we now are in places where murder is part of the political process.

How will her assassination affect our own debate about dealing with a post-9/11 world in which our "friend" Pervez Musharraf promises to protect us from terrorists and is unable or unwilling to prevent such suicide attacks in his own country? How safe can we feel about a nuclear Pakistan so vulnerable to the will of extremists for whom killing is a form of religious and political expression?

Our own candidates, from the safety of Iowa and New Hampshire, will no doubt say all the right things about how tough, realistic and determined our policies should be in the face of this kind of reality. But how much more can they do than the clueless Bush Administration has done in protecting us from it?

Bedford Falls in D.C.

In the era of Bush, Cheney and broken government, just in time for reruns of "It's a Wonderful Life," we get a Capraesque moment. After three decades in the Senate, Chris Dodd doesn't look much like Jimmy Stewart, but for the time being, he has saved the savings and loan or, in view of his filibuster threat, is it the boy's camp from "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?"

Until after the holidays, at least, the Senate won't be giving telecoms retroactive immunity for illegal spying on Americans. The Majority leader (if you use the word loosely) was ready to Christmas-wrap that gift for the Bush Administration until a few Bill of Rights Scrooges started talking about traditional American values.

“Today," Sen. Dodd said of Harry Reid's decision to put off the vote on the FISA bill, "we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy.”

Before we get all misty-eyed, start re-reading "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" and sending checks to Dodd for President, it might help to ponder how far we have come from the innocence and hope of those old Capra movies.

But it's good to be reminded that the spirit of Jimmy Stewart still lives in Washington, even if embodied in a white-haired Presidential candidate who is polling in the single digits.

9/11 and Other American Plots

When fire breaks out in a mental hospital, the paranoids are the first to respond--they always expect someone to do terrible things.

That bit of apocryphal folklore comes to mind with news today that almost two-thirds of Americans think federal officials knew in advance of 9/11 but chose to ignore the warnings.

A similar survey last year showed one out of three thinks our government assisted in the attacks or took no action to stop them so the US could go to war in the Middle East.

These conspiracy beliefs come, not from residents of a mental hospital, but a study of Americans normal enough to answer their own phones.

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a book widely read because its thesis was then so new and startling: that a "sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy" was spreading from the lunatic fringes into the mainstream of our national life.

The political paranoid, he wrote, "does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician...Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated."

From then on, starting with President Kennedy's assassination, more and more Americans believed everything that happened had to be part of some evil design, rather than the result of human randomness. No one could be trusted and, during its tenure, the Bush Administration has provided much evidence to support such suspicions.

But, in large part, distrust goes back to changes in perception as well as politics. Before TV, news was what people in power said it was, and there was no way to see behind the official version of truth. But with events coming into our living rooms, we could start to make our own judgments about what was really going on.

Now, with 24/7 news everywhere, everyone is "in the know," and there is no reason to accept the official version of anything. As any blogger can tell you, the more devious the explanation for events, the more attention and, for some, credence it receives.

We are now free from getting only a whitewashed picture of the world, but are we closer to any truths by getting a flood of blackwashed analyses of everyone's actions and motives? Little wonder that some Americans now see everything as a conspiracy,

A Friend in the White House

On The Nation's web site, Bill Moyers talks about his father who never made over $100 a week in his life and voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four elections "because the President's my friend."

As a Depression child a decade older than Moyers, I can top that--my father never made more than $55 and worked up to 60 hours a week for it.

Our paths, Moyers' and mine, crossed in the 1960s and 1970s when he worked in Lyndon Johnson's White House and afterward as a commentator for CBS and NBC before finding a home in public television. As the voice of Americans who work hard for what they get, he has always been his father's son.

"My father got it," Moyers says "when he heard his friend in the White House talk about how 'a small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor--other people's lives.' My father knew FDR was talking for him when he said life was no longer free, liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness--against economic tyranny."

Contrast this with Moyers' assessment of Karl Rove who "modeled the Bush presidency on that of William McKinley, who was in the White House from 1897 to 1901, and modeled himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one consummate passion--to serve corporate and imperial power...that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit."

Whoever takes over the White House next will be somebody's friend. The questions won't be as simple as they were in the last century or the one before that, but voters might want to give a thought to Moyers' father and Rove's role model before they make their choice.

Listening to the People

The man who gave a voice to unheard Americans is speaking up today against illegal listening in on them.

In a New York Times Op Ed, 95-year-old Studs Terkel recounts the history of illegal wiretapping during the Red Scare day of the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s and now the Bush Administration's dismantling of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Terkel became famous for taping and airing conversations that, in his words, "celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd."

In a new memoir, the once-blacklisted liberal compares himself jokingly to Richard Nixon, saying both "could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am," or in his own case, "I tape, therefore they are." Terkel's oral histories brought so-called ordinary Americans into history.

Now he is enraged at an executive branch that listens to them too much against their will and at a Congress "moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a 'get out of jail free card' to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers.

"Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them."

The man who taught us how to listen to America deserves to be heard on a subject he knows well.

Rudy's Crusade

If he keeps moving right at this rate, Rudy Giuliani is in danger of falling off the edge of the flat earth.

The knight who drove criminals out of Manhattan, single-handedly cleaned up Ground Zero after 9/11 and kept al Qaeda from taking over New York has strapped on his armor to rid the Holy Land of Islamo-Fascism.

With an array of blood-related Neo-Con Sancho Panzas--Podhoretzes, Kagans and Kristols--Sir Rudy has been on the campaign trail tilting so hard at windmills that even the New York Times today has noticed what bloggers have been reporting for some time:

“Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for United Nations.

“But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

“Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.”

Sir Rudy gave some clues to his thinking last week in a speech during “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” blasting Democrats for never using “the word ‘Islamic terrorist.’ Ever.”

In the course of saddling up for his crusade, Guiliani, who has at times been accused of being too courtly, did not hesitate to take swipes at the opposition’s Lady in Waiting:

“Honestly, in most respects, I don’t know Hillary’s experience. She’s never run a city. She’s never run a state. She’s never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people.”

At this rate, Giuliani may yet win over the hearts of the Radical Right, who for some time now have been suspecting that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may have lost their cojones for doing God’s work in the Middle East.

Spying on Your Circle of Friends

If a suspected terrorist mis-dialed your number any time in the past two years, the FBI is on your case and, if the phone company had had the technology, they might have been investigating everyone you know.

A Congressional committee learned yesterday that Verizon has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005 in addition to the thousands obtained through subpoenas and court orders.

Moreover, the FBI wanted to know not only about the person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. The only reason they didn’t get it was that Verizon doesn’t keep data on this "two-generation community of interest."

To conceal the widening net of spying on innocent Americans, the Bush Administration has put up a brick wall of “state secrets” defenses, but as the enormity of surveillance, lawful and otherwise, becomes clearer, Congress is pressing for answers.

Some years ago, I received an apologetic letter from a law enforcement agency about a monitored phone call to my home from a friend of my teen-age son who was being investigated for selling marijuana. Apparently state law back then required notification about every such invasion of privacy.

We’re living in a different country now.

Bush Makes Republicans French Toast

He did it this morning, without comment or news coverage, an act that proves George Bush to be, depending on your politics, either the most steadfast or stubborn, the most principled or heartless of American Presidents in memory.

But there is common agreement in Congress that, by vetoing the bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children's health insurance, a lame duck Head of State has committed the most politically selfish act since Louis XV proclaimed, “Apres moi, le deluge” before the French Revolution.

Now Congressional Republicans, facing a guillotine at the ballot box in 2008, are scrambling to limit the damage. Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott talks bravely about a “compromise” with an Administration that takes no prisoners.

The Senate has enough votes to override, but House Minority Whip Roy Blunt is "absolutely confident" that the House will be able to sustain Bush's veto as Democrats keep trying to convince more than a dozen members on the other side of the aisle to switch their position.

If not, Nancy Pelosi can start practicing her knitting for the role of Madame DeFarge, as Republican incumbents go by on their way to the tumbrel in the George Bush revival of “A Tale of Two Cities” next fall.

Mini-Cuban Missile Crisis in the Mideast

When George Bush goes literally dumb, something must be afoot. At yesterday’s news conference, he talked about Iraq, Iran and North Korea, but refused any comment on Israel’s bombing of possible nuclear targets in Syria.

Former Prime Minister, now Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed such a strike this week based on suspicions that North Korea was exporting weapons materials to Israel’s neighbor, much as Soviet Premier Khruschev did to Cuba in 1962.

The American response back then was a blockade (more politely, quarantine) of further shipments and intense diplomacy that resulted in the Soviet Union’s removal of the weapons.

Israel historically has opted for more direct action, bombing an Iraqi plant in 1981 and making clear it would consider possession of nuclear weapons by Iran a threat to its existence.

Bush’s refusal to comment is understandable, but more puzzling is the continuing drumbeat by Cheney and his disciples for preemptive action against Iran by the U.S.

Don’t they trust Israel to do that particular dirty work for them?

Republicans' Pity Party

The Bush Administration keeps recalling the cliché about the kid who kills his parents and pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

Now Republicans are retiring in droves and bewailing the vicissitudes that have made their legislative lives unbearable.

Today’s Washington Post reports “moderate Republicans in Congress are facing a tough choice: Stand by President Bush or run for their political lives. Votes are due soon on Iraq, an expansion of a children's health insurance program and an array of spending bills. GOP leaders hope to use them to regain credibility with their base voters as a party for strong defense and fiscal discipline. But moderates, many of them facing the possibility of difficult reelection bids next year, are dreading the expected showdowns.”

It would be easier to sympathize with those Republican moderates if they hadn’t handed over the keys to their home to Newt Gingrich in 1994 and stood by while George W. Bush has been burning it down for the past six years.

Emblematic of their experience is the recent decision of Lincoln Chafee, a second-generation product of what used to be respectable Republicanism, to leave the party that sent him to the Senate but then turned its back on him over his positions on abortion and gay rights.

The Democrats who stand to gain by the Republican debacle might want to keep in mind that, despite the horror show of the Bush years, there is no ultimate profit for a party that abandons its core principles.

Cheney's New, Improved War

The Vice-President of the United States is packaging his attack on Iran.

Unfazed by the disaster in Iraq, Cheney’s Neo-Cons are “rolling out” a “new product” exactly as they did in 2002 and, as then, over the resistance of the State Department.

The New York Times reports “Condoleezza Rice has been arguing for a continuation of a diplomatic approach, while officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have advocated a much tougher view. They seek to isolate and contain Iran, and to include greater consideration of a military strike.”

In the Washington Post, retired Gen. Wesley Clark writes, “Think another war can't happen? Think again. Unchastened by the Iraq fiasco, hawks in Vice President Cheney's office have been pushing the use of force...And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left.”

In the U.K., the Telegraph reports “Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran” and a senior intelligence officer warns “that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq--arming and training militants--would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories” to “provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.”

This follows a U.K. Times story about a speech by a conservative think tank expert saying “military planners were not preparing for ‘pinprick strikes’ against Iran’s nuclear facilities. ‘They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,’ he said.”

The President started the campaign rolling here with an echo of the warnings about Saddam’s WMD in a recent speech to the American Legion: “Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust...We will confront this danger before it is too late.”

Back in May, our bellicose former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was telling the British, ”We must attack Iran before it gets the bomb” and that “senior White House officials” share his thinking.

So even before the Surge and in the face of public clamor to get out of Iraq, Cheney and his crowd were covertly planning a war against Iran.

About all this, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning: "We have got to put pressure on the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies.”

He should be telling that to his Congressional colleagues and reminding them that another botched Bush war could create an unprecedented crisis for American democracy.

Greenspan and Groucho

In his complex commentaries, the former Fed chairman always seemed the ultimate anti-Groucho, immune to pith and irony.

But ironies abound. Even as Alan Greenspan sums up his public life, news of the book itself reflects a central lesson from it--the difficulty of controlling events in a free-enterprise society.

The New York Times was given an exclusive first look to report on publication date, Monday. But the Wall Street Journal bought a copy, published excerpts last night, and other news organizations followed.

The big news, according to the Journal, is Greenspan’s assertion that “the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles.”

“They swapped principle for power,” the Times quotes him as writing. “They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

In coming days, there will be debate over Greenspan’s role in promoting the housing bubble and his apparent approval of sub-prime lending, which has now led to a credit disaster, as well as other facets of his management of the Fed under four presidents.

In the media blitz next week to push his book, Greenspan may want to revert to his show-business roots as a saxophone player and give interviewers a few of Groucho’s cryptic one-liners. Otherwise they won’t understand his explanations any more than they did when what he said really mattered.

The Lasting Losses of 9/11/01

That morning, when the second airliner hit the Twin Towers, life changed for every American, starting with the inane man who was reading “The Pet Goat” to second-graders in Sarasota, Florida. None of us would ever again feel as safe as we had before, and the accidental President who emerged from the disputed 2000 election would be empowered to change our lives in ways that would have otherwise been unimaginable.

Without 9/11, we would not now be enmeshed in an endless war in Iraq against the will of a majority of our people, be subjected to unthinkable government surveillance and invasions of privacy, and facing an election year in which voters with good reason seem to have lost faith in all politicians.

What happened that day might have, as it first appeared, brought us together in a shared sense of purpose arising from shock and grief. But the President who could have nurtured that unity was surrounded by politicians who saw fear as a way to win elections and crackpots who took it as an opportunity to test their theories of dominating the world with American military power.

With any other President in the Oval Office that day, we would be living in a different post-9/11 world than the one Bush, Cheney and their crew created.

Osama bin Laden’s murderous minions had to be lucky as well as cunning and evil to cause as much devastation as they did that day and, with the help of this Administration, in the six years since. On our part, we have much more to repair in America than Ground Zero in Manhattan.