Reply #110: George W. Bush: We can't afford security (mentions Plame case)

[coeur_de_lion]

George W. Bush: We can't afford security
10/04/2004 ¡X
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That's an important non-proliferation effort going unfunded. Taken in conjunction with other failures, such as the administration's non-fucntional policies toward North Korea and Iran, its acceptance of the ceremonial wrist-slap administered by Pakistan to A.Q. Khan, the leading nuclear weapons scientitst in the country and for two decades the heart of a proliferation black market and even its outing of CIA proliferations agent Valerie Plame, the failure to fund and aggressively pursue the state department's effort to prevent scientists with banned weapons know-how from seeking employment elsewhere in the world indicates that the administration either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the threat that weapons proliferation in general and those instances in particular pose to our country and the world.

From the president's response to John Kerry's littany of overlooked security issues, it's clear that in those cases and in the case of the effort to find decent work for Iraq's weapons industry scientitsts, the administration has quite frankly placed tax cuts targeted to wealthy individuals ahead of our national security.

Not even the biggest beneficiary of those tax cuts should support such a deal. What good is a tax cut if it so weakens the country that you don't get to enjoy it?

Until Iraq headed so obviously south that it became impossible to ignore, a common refrain among journalists and pundits was that attacking George Bush's national security credentials would be suicide because that's the arena in which he is perceived to be strongest. That he was as inveterate a screwup in that field as he has been in every other substantive endeavor was irrelevant; people wouldn't like it if that perception was disturbed even if by reality.
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