If Your Mind's Confused

In his speech yesterday, endorsing the renewal of the Patriot Act, President Bush keeps reading from the John Ashcroft script that misrepresents and cravenly shifts blame for their failures, to the "wall":

First, before September the 11th, law enforcement, intelligence, and national security officials were prevented by legal and bureaucratic restrictions from sharing critical information with each other, and with state and local police departments.

We had -- one group of the FBI knows something, but they couldn't talk to the other group in the FBI -- because of law and bureaucratic interpretation. You cannot fight the war on terror unless all bodies of your government at the federal, state, and local level are capable of sharing intelligence on a real-time basis. We could not get a complete picture of terrorist threats, therefore. People had -- different people had a piece of the puzzle, but because of law, they couldn't get all the pieces in the same place. And so we removed those barriers, removed the walls. You hear the talk about the walls that separate certain aspects of government; they have been removed by the Patriot Act. And now, law enforcement and intelligence communities are working together to share information to better prevent an attack on America.

Look, whether you are for or against the election of President Bush, why should we let him run using falsehoods?