‘Whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure?’

This is really good. From Carpetbagger Report. Gore at his finest.

GQ asked, for example, whether we’d be safer today if he’d won the 2000 race. Gore said, “Well, no one [can] say that the 9-11 attack wouldn’t have occurred whoever was president.” [moderate political response so far - ed]

GQ followed up, “Really? How about all the warnings?” That’s when it got good. The description of Gore’s speaking style appears in the original:

“That’s a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, ‘I would have heeded the warnings.’ In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, ‘Well, you’ve covered your ass.’ And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job.