The Sunshine Empire

This morning I was watching the news and the big story was former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s new book that claims he was pressured to change the color coded threat level system to help former President Bush politically. Now of course former Bush administration officials came out quickly to defend the former Administration against charges of mixing politics and terror. Now if you just forget Ridge’s comments and look at the political calendar and transpose it to changes in the color coding to orange it’s plain to anyone Democrat or Republican that the system was being moved always around political events. But the defense of the administration is telling.

The main defense of the Bush Administration seems to be, “nah uhh.” The Huffington Post quotes Bush Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend as saying, “Under no circumstance was Tom Ridge or anyone else directed to change the threat level,”. Well yeah, but he’s not claiming that. If you read his accusation he stated that when in the meeting of the national security team prior to the 2004 election, he was strongly urged to raise the threat level by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General Ashcroft when his people at Homeland Security said there was no basis to do so. So Fran is not really refuting anything Ridge says. Of course he wasn’t told to change it. He’s not claiming he was. Yet at the same time Secretary Ridge isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know.