August 4, 2004
I don't know who Tom Ridge thinks he's kidding, but when he said on Tuesday that his department of homeland security "doesn't do politics," it was hard to take him seriously.
Especially since on Sunday, when announcing the terror alert, he praised President Bush for his stewardship of the war on terror.
Hey Tom, you can't have it both ways.
Now I don't know what to make of these terror alerts.
But I do know that these guys in the White House "do politics" whenever they breathe.
And I do know that they've got two bad habits: incompetence and dishonesty.
I just don't know which one we're dealing with here.
It could be incompetence: They just may not have gotten their story straight the first time they gave us the news, and they had to backtrack.
But forgive us for being at least somewhat skeptical.
At one previous alert, Ashcroft said he had serious evidence of a terror threat, and he hadn't even informed Ridge, who said it was nothing new once he heard about it.
And beyond that, here's an Administration that lied to us about the intelligence they were using as a basis for launching the Iraq War and that talked about rolling out the propaganda for the war as if it were a new product.
Credibility is a non-renewable resource. And these guys have used theirs all up.