Pattern of deceit
Tim, as I see it, this is not an issue of George Tenet. This is an issue of George Bush. And it’s not a singular incident. There’s been a pattern in this administration, beginning with the development of the energy policy in the first few weeks, running through environmental policy, economic policy, and now Iraq and the war on terror, in which the American people have not been let in to understand what is going on, what the basis of decisions will be, and we end up having to go through almost a grammar lesson of word-by-word assessment of what’s been said in order to understand what the leadership of this country is intending to communicate.
We've had some of those grammar lessons this week!
Focus on AQ
It’s the fact that we’ve taken our focus off the major threat to the lives of Americans in terms of foreign forces, and that is al-Qaeda and the other international terrorist groups. Those are the ones who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11. Those are the ones who have the will and capacity.
We lost focus. We allowed al-Qaeda to regroup and regenerate. They’ve conducted a series of very sophisticated operations, thus far, none of them in the United States, but seven Americans were killed in Saudi Arabia.
Fiscal discipline
I think it’s going to take a combination of spending cuts, it’s going to take eliminating most of the tax cuts that have recently been passed in 2001, 2003, in order to begin to give some sense of fiscal discipline and generational responsibility back to the American people.