As Atrios says, no surprise:
Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
Parole Officer Burke
Shouldn’t that be “I’ll take things you won’t hear about on “Morning Joe” for $500, Alex”?
[nitpicking commenter is nitpicking]
Parole Officer Burke
Oop. Fixed faster than the speed of commenting! [shuts up]
gypsy howell
A) I thought we already knew this.
B) “Worth resigning over” but did it anyway.
C) Now plans to make money from a book telling us what we already know
D) Aren’t there any fucking laws against this? I know… I know. Just keep walking. Look forward not back.
MattF
Counting down to Karl Rove accusing Democrats of politicizing the War on Terror: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,…
Hunter Gathers
Tom Ridge is covering his own ass.
beltane
But Obama is like Hitler.
Someone please wake me up when a Republican appears who puts his/her country before his/her party.
Hunter Gathers
@beltane: Enjoy your 40 year nap.
Left Coast Tom
Imagine that, the DFHs were right again.
If he thought it were worth resigning over then Ridge might have…resigned. These tell-alls are going to be entertaining, but they would have been a lot more useful if they had come back in 2004 when they might have done some good. At this point it’s just opportunistic.
PeakVT
Looks like Ridge is not planning to run for office as a Repuke again.
Violet
@Left Coast Tom:
neill
if tom ridge is covering his ass… he sure is admitting to being a wimpy little dumb ass — one of the top ten dumbest fuckin’ … on earth.
gypsy howell
@Left Coast Tom:
Really. Name one substantive thing we’ve been wrong about. Ever.
Violet
Arrgh! What happened to my post? The inside blockquote was my own comment. How did it get inside the other quote?
Looking forward to the updated site!
ellaesther
I’m going to be a little one-note in the near future, because I’m all about Mr. Lincoln these days, but be that as it may, here’s a funny little thing:
Back when Lincoln was running for and waiting to be seated in the US Congress, President Polk was running a made-up war against Mexico. It was over a lot faster than our current made-up war in Iraq, but the parallels are striking: The US government claimed it had to act because of Mexican aggression, for instance, because “US citizens were killed on US territory” — when in fact the dead were US soldiers killed after crossing the border into Mexican territory. The end result was that the US ripped huge chunks of Mexico off for itself. In short: Lying about another, far weaker country, holding that country up as a serious threat to US citizens, and using our over-whelming power ultimately to attempt a re-design of that nation for our own purposes — not new.
Also not new: Freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln stood on the House floor and railed against Polk, in a fashion that was perhaps a bit over the top, demanding repeatedly that the President show the nation the very “spot” on which the supposed aggression took place on US soil. Because, of course, he couldn’t.
The political upshot? Polk fulfilled his expansionist dream all the way out to California, and Congressman Lincoln was mocked in Polk-supportive newspapers as “Spotty” Lincoln.
I believe my point, and the only way that this doesn’t constitute GROSS off-topicness is: Everything old is new again. When the guys in power lack the most basic of moral underpinnings, they tend to do whatever they hell they want, and the people who call bullshit on it get elbowed aside and laughed at. I don’t know why I find our long history of this comforting, but I do.
Zifnab
But he didn’t. Cause he was a loyal Bushie. And thank god for that. Without Tom Ridge playing political watchdog and giving valuable advice, who knows where our country would have landed by the end of the Bush Admin.
:-p
Demo Woman
@PeakVT: You are probably correct and it’s a loss for the republican party.
Dork
I gave up on the ’04 election when it became so ludicrously obvious to anyone with a notochord that the terror alert colors were being manipulated for policital benefit, yet the media pretended like the threats were legit and real.
Remember, they instituted the “ZOMG! No contact lens solution or lactating mothers on planes!” in August 2006, just as the momentum-changing 2006 elections were approaching. Anyone who couldn’t see the duplicitous nature of this declaration (read: the media assholes) just didn’t want to see it.
kay
It’s naive, but I still think it’s shocking that they changed the terror colors to help Bush’s re-election bid.
The 2004 election was really a low point in all sorts of ways. Just horrible.
scarshapedstar
I wonder if Glenn Reynolds and co. will finally retract their “LEFT-WING PARANOIA ABOUT TERROR ALERTS: CAUSED BY TOO MUCH DIXIE CHICKS? Heh-indeed” bullshit now that we were… drumroll… proven right for the eleventy-seventh-billion time?
Wait, actually, I don’t wonder about that at all.
Mr Furious
Fuck Ridge. If that’s how he felt, he should have walked out and held a press conference. Instead, he wrote it in his fucking diary, stayed on the job, and saved it for his book years down the road.
SGEW
@ellaesther:
Same as it ever was, as it were. For instance:
– Edward Livingston, 1830 (emphasis added)
[From American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House]
malraux
How often are people going to be surprised that the terror alerts were manipulated for political gain? Not only was that obvious at the time, with a completely implausible terror alert always coinciding with bad polling or political news for Bush, but Ridge has specifically admitted this previously.
BTW, is anyone else getting WP errors again?
Legalize
Test.
Violet
WordPress database error again. Test post to see if it goes away.
Violet
Didn’t seem to work. Margins still effed up for me. Db error still at top and sides of page.
Looking forward to the new, improved website!
Violet
Didn’t seem to work. Margins still effed up for me. Db error still at top and sides of page.
Looking forward to the new, improved website!
Mark S.
My god, yes. There’s a huge gap between each comment. The last two days, I’ve only been able to get the site to load about 50% of the time.
jwb
Amazing wordpress errors and it’s taking forever for the site to load. I can has upgrade soon, plz!
shelley matheis
I love this blog. But man, it does go bizarr-o an awful lot.
ellaesther
@SGEW: Wow. It took me until now to be able to get back on the New N’ Improved Balloon Juice, but am I glad I did — that could have been written yesterday!
I think the comfort that I take is that I can look that far back in time and see that in spite of these (apparently) human tendencies to behave in these horrible ways, the American people has moved forward, even if in fits and starts.
And also, as they will tell you in the 12-step programs, acknowledging the problem is the first step to dealing with it…. Just sayin’, American people!
ellaesther
@malraux: It’s kind of the horror that keeps on giving. I know that I shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of craven behavior anymore, but damn if it doesn’t slap me upside the head every time.
Demo Woman
@Hunter Gathers: It’s good news for John McCain. John McCain by the way will be the guest on “This week” on Sunday.
catclub
Fake WMDs were never found in Iraq.
This is the level that Bush did not (quite) descend to.
I am confident they considered faking some.
It is scary that GW Bush turned out to to be the sane one,
who reined in Cheney’s madness.
jomo
Here in NY we felt it acutely everytime they raised the threat level. The fear was palpable, particularly the first few times they did it. But after a while they were raising it every time they needed to deflect the press or influence an election. It’s not news to us, but it is nice to see it written up.
tim
If Tom Ridge had a conscience he would have resigned and blabbed all this back when it could have made a difference for the health of the country.
Instead, as do most of these cretins, he saves his outrage for the pages of his oh so predictable tell-all book, which will just coincidentally put big dollars in his pocket.
Fuck him. Why should I believe anything in this piece of garbage? The man was a Bush enabler and liar and has no credibility, just like Andrew Sullivan who is now worshiped as soothsaying media god.
Legalize
One thing you WILL hear and see on Morning Joe is Anthony Wiener making Joe look like the buffoon he is because said buffoon can’t articulate a single thing of value brought to the table by insurance companies – other than shut up, that’s why; and you’re a commie. Although making Joe look like a buffoon isn’t exactly honest work. If anyone has a link to that, I assure you, it’s entertaining as hell.
ed
But didn’t. In the subsequent book tour, it would be nice for someone to ask what would have had to happen for Ridge to resign. (Same could be asked of Colin Powell. Or a shitload of others.)
ellaesther
@Legalize: Here you go: A link!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/19/congressman-anthony-weine_n_263175.html
mutt
Tom Ridge=Sullivan?
Calouste
@beltane:
Ho, ho, ho. Let’s learn the crawl before we can walk, shall we? We first need to find a Republican who is willing to put the party before their own interests, for example by resigning when caught in a scandal instead of clinging on and damaging the party’s prospects at the next election.
Bokonon
By his own metric, Ridge should have resigned.
But Ridge didn’t do that, did he? Whether out of a feeling that he needed to continue serving his country in a post 9/11 time of crisis, or because he fundamentally didn’t have the courage of his convictions … he didn’t do it.
But either way, Ridge’s decision to stay on while getting played (and, essentially, having his credibility prostituted, the same way that the Bush inner circle did to Powell) does not look good in retrospect.
And let’s not forget one critical fact: the heightened terrorist warning on election day in 2004 election was used as an excuse by some Ohio counties to declare a “state of emergency” and shut down public scrutiny of the vote counts. And their presidential election results then swung dramatically from the Democrats to the GOP. The DFH crowd has been calling election fraud ever since …
Anne Laurie
@ellaesther:
AZmando
Along with Colin Powell, Ridge is one of the Bushies that could have saved us from a lot of damage in this nation. He had enough credibility and stature to say, “It’s BS” and not get 100% traitor treatment by the non-looney GOP.
Colin Powell forever holds the blame for thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis deaths and disabilities, not to mention a quite a few American soldiers as well. He could have stopped it IMO, but he was a total coward.
SGEW
@Anne Laurie: Thank you for putting that “we” into quotation marks (to avoid my inevitable “What do you mean ‘we’ . . .” remark).
Because you know that damage doesn’t always heal right.
And sometimes the wall doesn’t fall.
Anne Laurie
@Dork:
Even the loyalest Fixt News viewer can only throw away so many expensive toiletry bottles, crying-baby-soothers, and caffeine-infusers before getting resentful about the Party in Power, if only on a subconscious level. Stealing billions of “invisible” tax dollars is one thing, but having to give over my $8 moccachino while some uniformed thug berates me is just a power-grab too far.
someguy
@ AZmondo,
Yeah, whatever. Shill for the man until it becomes unpopular, then say, “but I was against what the man was doing.”
Riiiiiiiiiight…
someguy
@ Ann Laurie:
they tried to pin that one on the so-called liquid bomb plot that the British allegedly broke up in July 2006, but all indications are that the arrests were just Blair helping out Bush in Teh Warr on Moose Limbs.
Blair converted to Catholicism (or at least publicly confessed to it) the week after he left office, y’know that, right?
I think Bush got to him with the crusader talk.
Left Coast Tom
This may be too late for the thread, but hopefully…
Does anyone else remember the year that the Shrubbies declared a Terrorist Alert that, around Memorial Day Weekend, al Qaeda was trying to Destroy ‘Merkin Tourist Attractions? I was skiing in Mammoth Lakes that weekend. From the Bay Area all the way across the Sierra there wasn’t a police officer to be seen. Once I reached Mammoth the town was so flooded with CHP from all over the state that one didn’t dare drive 36 on Main St. (speed limit 35). Before reaching Mammoth one could have driven 90 on winding mountain roads without attracting any official attention. While soaking at a nearby hot spring I talked with someone from Sonoma who commuted to SF prior to the AM traffic jams, who said that because of the bogus “security” “alert” he could safely drive 90 right up until he reached the Golden Gate Bridge, at which point he had to become Law Abiding because the CHP was ready to Go Down With It’s Bridge.
I guess that was another thing that the pre-Book-Publishing Tom Ridge didn’t have any problems with.
Tom Degan
Sure, they exploited America’s utter post 9/11 paranoia for the most base political reasons. Ridge’s book is not news. The only thing newsworthy is the fact that someone who was in the know is finally admitting it. He should have written his book five years ago.
I knew what was going on in the hours leading up to the election of 2004. It was so freaking obvious, you had to be an idiot to miss it.
On the first posting on my blog on June 2, 2006, I wrote the following:
“PREDICTION: George W. Bush will be remembered in history, primarily, as the first (pray last) former chief executive to go to federal prison. Sound crazy? Stay tuned.”
I stand by those words.
http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com
Tom Degan
Goshen, NY