EDITORIAL - If you have spent any time over the last few months reading about the 9/11 Commission, one thing should be readily apparent: America is to blame. Forget the notion that the Commission?s goal is to help prevent another 9/11 from every happening again. Laugh away the idea that the Commission wants to objectively look at the intelligence failures that made the attack possible. And, do not even entertain the thought that reality might interject its ugly face into their deliberations.

The 9/11 Commission is proving that it would rather be a sound bite factory for the media, where Democrats and Republicans take turns demonizing the other for allowing 9/11 to occur, rather than acknowledging the truth. Neither the Clinton nor the Bush Administrations are to blame for 9/11.

No American President, I do not care how bad, would allow a disaster on the scale of 9/11 to occur. The 9/11 Commission would have us believe that Presidents Clinton and Bush just sat around purposely pushing the warnings of the 9/11 attacks under the carpet. For what reason, they fail to say. Evidently, they feel that the two Presidents must have wanted to have 3000 Americans killed, our economy disrupted, and our society thrown into turmoil for nothing more than yucks and giggles.

Both political parties are guilty of placing political expedience over the safety of American citizens and interests across the globe. Democrats talk about ?another Vietnam? so much I think they actually miss it. Republicans, while more defense oriented than the Democrats, are not above taking a shot at a President using military action to further their political agendas. It was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who were anti-war when the United States attacked Serbia. Republicans accused Clinton of trying to distract the American people from the Monica Lewinski scandal by sending cruise missiles after Bin Laden. It was the GOP that mocked Clinton for blowing up an aspirin factory in the Sudan without over mentioning the fact that there is no substantive difference between the technology to produce modern medicines and W.M.D. Bill Clinton could not have acted more aggressively against Osama Bin Laden because the political climate of Washington would not have permitted it.

We cannot lay all the fault at the door of Republicans. The Democratic Party has spent the last thirty years trying to destroy America?s ability to defend itself. In their mindless onslaught to liberalize our schools, create a self perpetuating social welfare class, hobble free enterprise, and rework our court systems into a Socialist oligarchy, they found that endlessly increasing the tax burden on working citizens did not raise revenues quickly enough. The only option the Democratic Party saw to fund their social reengineering dreams was to systematically eliminate defense spending.

The result is that the Democratic Party sees any increase in military spending, or the utilization of our armed forces in legitimate national defense as an attack on their political power base. To prevent this, they will use any scare tactic or subterfuge to prevent Americans from seeing our national defense as the priority that it is. Whether they are ranting about Iraq being another Vietnam (this is about the fourth or fifth Vietnam we have been in since 1980), or blindly trying to place the future of our security into the hands of the United Nations, the Democrats see a vulnerable America as a safe America.

America has paid dearly for this Democratic propaganda campaign. American public opinion has been brainwashed into thinking that military self defense is so evil that no President was prepared to take the political risk of preempting a foreign terrorist attack. The nation would not have supported it, and the President would have seen his administration collapse into obsolescence without information so concrete that it could withstand the partisan fury that would have followed any action. Even the finest, most accurate intelligence in the world cannot make the President omniscient. There is no way to say this event will occur at this time with any accuracy. At best, intelligence is nothing more than an educated guess. Does anyone actually think that President Bush could have invaded Afghanistan to root out Al-Qaeda because they bombed the U.S.S. Cole? Can you imagine the accusations of ?racism? and ?Islam phobia? if Bush had moved to freeze Bin Laden?s funding network based on sketchy data from unconfirmed sources?

The 9/11 Commission will accomplish nothing because it is part of the same self destructive politicizing of national security that hand cuffed the United States from acting against Al-Qaeda in the first place. Osama Bin Laden is responsible for 9/11. He orchestrated, funded, and implemented the attack. If American intelligence had been able to gain any tangible information about the upcoming terrorist act, America would have uses its resources to prevent it. However, the partisan power struggle in Washington has risen to such a high level, that before 9/11, no President could have survived the political aftermath of defending the Homeland.