Ridge, reputation and resignation

By Dave Anderson:

Thoreau wins post of the day on his take with Tom Ridge's unsurprising revelation that the terror alert system was being run to manipulate people to vote Republican:

Tom Ridge has finally admitted that maybe, just maybe, creating a giant color-coded national mood ring and using to scare the shit out of the public might actually have been part of a plot to manipulate the public into voting for Bush.

I would be willing to reinstate the entire Bush administration just so we can impeach them all, then reinstate them and impeach them all again, then dump them into a maximum security prison and put up a web cam so we can watch their gang initiation ritual, or whatever it is that the inmates decide to do with them.

Tom Ridge stated that he believed it was wrong to play the terror alert system like a bad set of jazz scales. He admitted that this was worth resigning over in 2004 when it was happening. And then he did not resign until significantly after the election and started to leak the obvious to USA Today and others in 2005. He had a chance to make this manipulation an electorally costly and counter-productive action during 2004 and he was quiet.

Instead Tom Ridge argued that anyone who suggested that the terror alert system was potentially being manipulated was unserious and ridiculous (h/t Glenn Greenwald):

'I categorically state that the none of the terror threats are politically motivated,' Mr. Ridge said." Ridge also granted an extensive interview to CNN's Newsnight With Aaron Brown, in which he addressed the charges that the Administration was playing politics, saying, "I regret that there's an inference that this kind of public revelation of information is. . .political. It clearly was not and it never will be."

Now that no one can accuse him of being pre-maturely anti-Bush, he joins the pig-pile and confirms the obvious in an attempt to salvage portions of his reputation.

I have the same lack of respect for the 'guts' it took to say the obvious now as I have for the Powell coterie and apology tour. Both Ridge and Powell are stating that they were anti-Bush and against some of the worst aspects of the first Bush term including playing politics with the terror alert system and lying about WMDs in Iraq to wage an aggressive and pointless war. They were each in position to do something about those things by resigning before they were asked to carry what they now claim were too heavy buckets of water. They had the power, they had the opportunity and they now argue that they had the motive to make a difference. And they did nothing.

I think a counterfactual in which Colin Powell resigned in late January 2003 and announced that so far he had seen no reliable evidence that could pass the 'preponderance of evidence' bar much less the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' bar that Iraq was a threat nation with an active and ongoing WMD program would have had an impact. That would have cemented his reputation even if it did not stop the war; it would have made Bush a one termer as soon as the ISG came out and reported that Belgium's 'arsenal' of lost WWI shells was more deadly and capable of causing fatalities than Iraq.

I think the same strand of counterfactual where Tom Ridge resigned in the summer of 2004 and declared that Bush was manipulating the terror scale and the Democrats were right to be suspicious of that would have moved a few percentage points of voters in a few key states. Again, Ridge had a chance to torpedo the re-election of George W. Bush and inflict political costs while protecting the public and fostering increased trust in government instead of the ongoing rot of deep and verified cynicism.

Neither resigned until after any chance of inflicting political costs on the Bush Administration passed. Instead they both carried the water of a corrupt, venal, lazy and myopic President and his band of advisors until it because too easy to not do that any more.

It is nice to see that both have come around to reality, but at this point, their reputations shouldn't be rehabilitated as they were enablers of the Bush Administrations' worst excesses by their silence and inaction when action had the possibility of inflicting high political costs.