bush: fedgov is incompetent, so it should be given more power

James Bovards's latest starts off:

In his radio address last week, Bush justified warrantless wiretaps by invoking the case of two 9/11 hijackers whom the feds failed to trace before the attacks. Bush declared, "Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late."

Bush neglected to mention that the two culprits were renting rooms in the house of an FBI informant prior to the hijacking.

These two known Al-Qaeda operatives were at a summit of terrorist plotters in Malaysia in 2000. The CIA knew that the two already possessed visas permitting them to travel to the United States. Yet the CIA failed to place their names on the "terrorist watch list," which would have alerted other federal agencies to the danger and blocked them from entering the United States. Sen. Richard Shelby observed in late 2002 that the CIA’s negligence "allowed at least two such terrorists the opportunity to live, move, and prepare for the attacks without hindrance from the very federal officials whose job it is to find them."

One of the problems with having Republicans in power is that they feel obligated to extol the virtues of the State, even though conservative thought teaches otherwise. The Democrats have a different problem. When out of power, they have to personalize the State's failures so that the institution they love doesn't suffer a credibility problem. Thus, all failures are BushCheney's fault, not the fault of the FedGov, which would work just swimmingly if Democrats had control of all the branches.