Frontline: "The Dark Side"

If our democracy survives the dark years of Bush and Cheney, and I believe it will, Frontline's story on Cheney and the response to 9/11 will be one of the definitive accounts of what went so terribly wrong with the Bush presidency. Never has our nation seen such abuse of power or such incompetence in the hands of people who have such contempt for facts and the US Constitution.

The involvement of George Tenet and Colin Powell in the fiasco of the last five years is a reminder of how reasonably good men can be sucked into something so dysfunctional and, in the end, so damaging to their reputations. But I will say this in defense of Tenet and Powell: there's probably much about the dark side of the Bush presidency we would never have learned if it had not been for those two.

The only real problem about Frontline's story is that, with the exception of some material at the end of the program, nearly the entire story could have been told two and a half years ago.

One other note. A few months back, Rumsfeld tried to claim credit for the fall of the Taliban. I'm glad Frontline set the record straight and gave credit for the defeat to the CIA which already had a plan (though Frontline didn't mention it, I believe that plan was formed at the end of the Clinton Administration).