Forget about riding the horse hard and put away wet, Bush is gonna ride this horse of FEAR Right through Nov. 2nd. It's all he's got.
Just one day after issuing a major terror warning that was supposedly prompted by new information, the New York Times and Washington Post report that the decision, in fact, was based on old information from before 9/11. Specifically, the Bush administration acknowledged "they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way." While the LA Times does point out that "it appears the information was updated as late as 2004" one senior official told the New York Times, "You could say that the bulk of this information is old." The key issue is not whether the threat is real – no one argues that al Qaeda still wants to do great harm to us, and credible intelligence must be acted upon to protect America. But politicizing intelligence and threat reports undermines the government's credibility and blurs the line between protecting the homeland and promoting fear for political gain.
