The NY Times lambastes Bush for not making airlines institute racial profiling after the "secret memo" on bin Laden, prior to 9/11. Yes, really. From their April 12, 2004 editorial:
No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster. But those what-if questions should haunt the president as they haunt the nation. In all probability, they do and it is only the demands of his re-election campaign that are guiding Mr. Bush's public stance of utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.So, Bush's failure to predict 9/11, and refusal to ban young Arab "threat profiles" from boarding aircraft is "self-righteous." If so, what do you call this piece of post-9/11 advice from their March 12, 2003 editorial?
[The Transportation Security Administration] is developing a sophisticated screening system designed to identify travelers who may pose a terrorist threat. It is a worthy goal--one ordered up by Congress--but the creation of a highly intrusive federal surveillance program raises serious privacy and due process concerns, which the government needs to address in a forthright manner.I'd call it rather myopic hindsight, myself. Compaining about Bush not doing something before the threat was clear, but objecting to him doing it later, when it was, might be ironic, biased and objectvely stupid, but far be it from me to call the NY Times "self-righteous."