Mortimer Zuckerman seems to me as passive and leadership-lacking as Dr. Rice. It's the same odd set of bureaucratic excuses: "Every new administration needs time...American people had little awareness of the threat...The media didn't evince much interest in terrorism..." Boy, he has the longest list of excuses, huh?

I think the overwhelming number of liberal thinkers give Bush and Rice a break for not stopping 9/11. Plenty of mistakes in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. But no one gives Bush and Rice an "A for Effort."

Isn't it weird the way Bush & Gang seem to work WAY harder at raising $200,000,000 in reelection funds---the constant attention, discipline, and focus each day---then they did TRYING to stop the 9/11 plot, even given the vague warnings they had?

Here's what I as a Dem liberal would have liked Dr. Rice to say: "Commissioners---It's true we had some warnings, and I swear I don't know even if we did everything right we could have stopped 9/11. But listen to me. We worked so hard with the information we had pre-9/11. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and I moved heaven and earth to deal with every little clue we had. We shook every tree for every clue. Terrorist chatter told us something big was coming, but we didn't know what. We tried like no other administration in history could have to determine what it was. But the bastards beat us that time. We did our best. I accept my responsibility for not quite doing enough to stop 3,000 Americans from dying. But no one...no one could have tried harder than I did to stop the tragedy."