Cole Dead Just Fodder for GOP Slime Cannon

Yesterday, The Washington Post's Dan Foomkin provided excellent insight into the deep cynicism of the Bush/Repug party's use of sailors who died in service to America.

The White House issued a solemn statement Thursday commemorating the sixth anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole.

The White House has been citing the Cole a lot lately, as part of its narrative that President Clinton, who was in charge back then, was asleep at the switch when it came to terrorism.

I went back to see what the White House statement was like on the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Cole. But there wasn't one!

And there wasn't one on the fourth, the third, the second or the first, either.

This is nothing new. In fact, military genius Bush was using the Cole dead for his own political cockamamy back in 2000, as a candidate. On Oct. 12, 2000, hours after the attack on the USS Cole, Bush was asked about the bombing. His response?

"Today, we lost sailors because of what looks like to be a terrorist attack. Terror is the enemy. Uncertainty is what the world is going to be about, and the next president must be able to address uncertainty. And that's why I want our nation to develop an antiballistic missile system that will have the capacity to bring certainty into this uncertain world."

Wow, that missile shield would have really helped a lot on 9/11! Oh, and by the way, what did the Bush junta do about those evil al Qeda-types after is was defitnitively determined that they had carried out the murderous attack upon the Cole? As this article in The Washington Post explains, they didn't do much...

But after concluding that bin Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole - a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney - the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.

But neocon GOP cynics don't allow their own inaction to stop them from issuing a faux solemn press release commemorating the SIXTH anniversary of the attack, in hopes that the people you can fool "all of the time," as Lincoln put it, will buy into their uber-selling point that Repugs are strong and Dems are weak on terror.

That such BS passes for leadership shames our great nation.