A Smoking Gun in the Fight Against Fascism

In the last few days, this lifetime Democrat has seen more than enough reason why he had not had a nervous breakdown or anything remotely similar in his decision to support Bush in the coming election. Details from the 9/11 Commission Report have confirmed that my party and its present leader are not sufficiently bold in their confrontation with Islamism. Others may differ, but the evidence from the report specified in the The New York Sun, even factoring in that paper’s well known bias, is devastating. Read the whole thing, of course (although at the moment it’s getting a lot of traffic):

In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times – Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.

It really doesn’t matter now what was in the documents from the National Archives that Mr. Berger says he inadvertently misplaced. The evidence in the commission’s report yesterday is more than enough to embarrass him thoroughly.He is a hardworking, warm man with a wonderful family, but his background as a trade lawyer and his dovish, legalistic and political instincts made him, in retrospect,the tragically wrong man to be making national security decisions for America in wartime.That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator’s judgment.

By the way, I concur with this sympathy for Berger (although not for his actions in the Archive–he seems a complete coward there). But I guess we can’t call them “The Follies Berger” anymore. It’s a little more serious than that.

UPDATE: Some have noted that because of the wound of the Lewinsky Affair, Berger may have had more power than the normal NSA. Although this is hard to determine finally, it makes some sense.