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Bob Geiger points out that today is day 1,800 since George W. Bush declared that we would get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and day 1,623 since Bush said “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him” :

[Bush] stood on the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center and declared that the terrorists who attacked us would “hear all of us soon.” A few days later, he invoked imagery of the Old West and, with steely resolve, said that he was committed to getting Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”

And here we sit, exactly 1,800 days later with a civil war in Iraq, the Taliban still killing American troops in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden very much alive and running free to podcast threats against our country from a Dick Cheney-like undisclosed location.

President Bush seems to have missed one of the central tenets of being a real tough guy: That you’re able to back up your words with action and, once you boast that you’re about to open a can of whoop-ass on someone, that it actually happen.

Right after 9/11, almost every American rallied around the Bush administration. Whatever our differences on other issues, we all wanted the same thing when it came to defeating the terrorists. Bush’s popularity soared because he was the guy who had the job.

I was glad to have Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell in charge. They had already fought a successful war in the mideast, and surely they understood the military, political and cultural forces in the region. In the years since, they had undoubtedly given a lot of thought to what had succeeded and what had failed. I told friends that we could hardly have chosen a better team to deal with this new threat from the mideast.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I couldn’t imagine that on September 12, Rumsfeld would try to change the subject from bin Laden and al Qaeda to Iraq. I might have imagined that Karl Rove would try to divide the nation for political gain by exploiting the tragedy that had united us. But I couldn’t imagine that a president who had sworn to protect the nation would agree to that.

Crises will come no matter who is in the White House. It does matter what we do when a crisis comes. Polls still give Bush good marks on terrorism, but that’s really an emotional hangover rather than a rational assessment of this administration’s performance.

Unfortunately, we could hardly have chosen a worse team to confront the challenge of 9/11.

Via Crooks and Liars, Bob Geiger has collected some pretty good political cartoons.

The minute-by-minute coverage of recent events that might, or might not, shed light on a nearly ten-year-old murder case illustrates the news media’s fetish about beautiful dead girls. Actually, since TV news is ratings-driven, the fetish is probably our own.

Over on Daily Kos, there’s a different perspective, and it’s worth a look: some beautiful dead girls who haven’t had the same kind of media and public attention:

We hear a lot about beautiful dead girls in the US media.  Here are some that we haven’t heard about much.  Their smiles haven’t been plastered over the supermarket tabloid press, and they’re not likely to be.  One of the reasons is that they don’t fit the popular stereotype of beautiful-woman-as-helpless-victim.