Can we trust President Bush?

David Limbaugh writes today on how liberals can't be trusted to handle national security. And by liberals he means Senator Kerry, but presumably he includes all liberals.

Both papers, amazingly, concede that the War on Terror and national security are the most important issues the next president will have to confront. Both admit that Kerry has been wishy-washy on these subjects. But both, ultimately, conclude that Kerry is the better choice, essentially, because he promises to do better. In other words, we should base our decision on some of Kerry's words, not his other words or actions to the contrary.

Well to be fair (although I don't know why Mr. Limbaugh would want to do that) maybe they've also factored in President Bush's poor performance in prosecuting the war on terror. Wait a moment, here's a quote from the New York Times endorsement of Senator Kerry. "There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure." So I guess they did look at Bush's performance too before making up their mind.

I could go down the list of President Bush's SNAFUs. Certainly I could include his failure to plan for enough troops and equipments to occupy Iraq (presumably based on his theory, explained to Pat Robertson, that there would be no casualties (unsurprisingly, the White House now denies the President ever making such a comment. I guess I would too.)). I could review the lawlessness that President Bush's occupation of Iraq allowed, leading both to loss of security for the Iraqi people, a loss of thousands of priceless artifacts from the dawn of human history, and, most importantly, a bonanza for those who would recruit allies to kill American soldiers. I could also review the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

I can already hear some of you saying, "But wait, Bryant, President Bush wasn't directly responsible for those things, was he?" What a weak response. Answer number one is that there is a chain of appointments that goes right back to the White House. Number two is that nobody in the chain of command, except a few lower level sergeants in the Abu Ghraib Scandal, has been held responsible in the slightest. We are a long way from Harry Truman and "the buck stops here."

Of course that brings us to our latest scandal, 380 tons of explosives disappearing in occupied Iraq. A top nuclear-proliferation expert commented on this disappearance in an interview with Salon Magazine.

That this happened is simply inexcusable. The administration knew the material was there. The IAEA warned them before the war. In their public statements to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 29, 2003, the IAEA noted that there were over 200 tons of HMX stored in Iraq. They continued to warn the administration privately after the war began, about the need to secure it.

The administration knew it was there. Why didn't they do anything about it? It was arrogance. I think you have to say that this is not incompetence as much as it is arrogance. They simply did not believe that they were going to have an insurgent or terrorist problem after taking the country. Even when the insurgency began, apparently there was no effort to try to go back and secure these materials.

We don't know yet if HMX and RDX are behind the roadside bombs that are going off almost daily in Iraq. We've been told that they were artillery shells or other munitions, which is certainly possible. But now that we know that nearly 380 tons of this material was stolen, it seems that this is the most likely use for it by insurgents. It's lightweight, it's highly insensitive, so it can be kicked around without it detonating, it can be pressed into a variety of shapes -- it's ideal for the kinds of terrorist attacks U.S. troops and Iraqis have been experiencing.

As John Stewart often remarks, it's hard to imagine how Senator Kerry could do worse. The only hope Limbaugh and his fellow Kerry Haters have is that people will compare an imaginary President Bush (strong, decisive, not a total screw up) with an imaginary Senator Kerry (weak, cowardly, evil alien from planet Z). Unfortunately there's still plenty of people who prefer the imaginary candidates to the real ones.