9/11 AND THE ELECTION

On the third anniversary of 9/11, the best way for Americans to honor the dead is to look to the future by realizing that the upcoming presidential election will be a referendum not on the candidates for the White House but on the conscience and convictions of the electorate itself.

Will there be no accountability on Abu Ghraib from the Bush gang, for example, as has become apparent, because voters do not have the moral spine to hold it responsible for the prevaricating "miscalculations" in Iraq?

Will American voters accept -- and by accepting, approve of -- the gang's "pattern of dishonesty" (Paul Krugman's term) in everything from character issues like the Maximum Leader's sketchy evasions about his own military service to policy issues like the cooked books of the federal budget deficit?

American voters ought to heed the advice of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who participated in an investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal that found a failure of leadership from top to bottom in the chain of command. Although Brown refused to call for the appropriate resignations of the top brass, as he should have, he said in Congressional testimony quoted Friday by the New York Times that, as the Times paraphrased it, judgments about the conduct of the war in Iraq, on Abu Ghraib and other matters, were up to voters to make. (Italics added.)

"When it comes to overall performance, there's another way of dealing with it, and that's called an election," Brown said.

Do Americans realize that by not holding the Bush gang accountable for gross violations of democratic principles of governance they would be condoning what has happened and blackening their own reputation? That by giving the Bush gang "four more years" they would be stamping their approval on the historic anomaly of the 2000 election, when the U.S. Supreme Court mistakenly appointed an unelected president?

To elect the Bush gang, truly for the first time, would be tantamount to shrugging off the American ideals for which the terrorists of 9/11 had such revulsion. It would be the worst way to honor the nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania who died on 9/11.