Bush era disintegration of the week

Early leaks from a forthcoming book by Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security Secretary, indicate that immediately prior to the 2004 election, he felt pressure to increase the terrorism threat level, which he now says he thought might have been politically motivated. He doesn't provide any evidence, other than a gut feel that he had, and of course others who participated have strongly repudiated his accusations that the Bush White House would ever, in a million years, have manipulated the public's fear of terrorism for electoral gain.

So add one more individual to the list of people who have betrayed George Bush's outsized premium on loyalty. At the time, Ridge swore up and down, even offered to take a lie detector test, that the only thing motivating changes in the terror threat level was public safety, and participated in widespread suggestion that anyone who thought otherwise was paranoid, un-American, and only motivated by politics themselves. Now, a book deal having made the difference, he reveals that he himself had the same suspicions. Pathetic. For the record, here is one individual's correlation between official threat levels and President Bush's approval ratings.

But hey, it's all old news now, isn't it? Why dredge up the past? It's all just partisan vindictiveness, right? I mean politically motivated threat level elevation, manipulation of intelligence that leads to war and 4000 Americans dead, the evisceration of the Justice Department for electoral ends, the secret and flagrant collusion of business interests with public policy, extra-judicial surveillance of American citizens, torture of detainees for no discernible benefit...those were all just policy differences, right? I mean, easy for us to say they're wrong now, but at the time, what was a guy like Ridge supposed to do?

It would be great if there were some way to incent politicians to indulge their "suspicions" and adherence to principle while they're in office, and not just after the fact, when the political winds safely change. Like if there were, you know, laws against government actions of this sort that made them punishable offenses. Oh, wait a minute - THERE ARE LAWS.