There may be good points buried in the crap, but it'd take herculean labor to dig them out.

Finally, there was a political aspect. The man who was
institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA
Director George Tenet. He was 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his
fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in
charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was
sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been
appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency
due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority
of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush
obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his
election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in
order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after
all, a Clinton appointee.

The Bushies' disdain for all things Clintonian is well-documented. The fact that Tenet was a Clinton appointee probably worked against him, but they kept him on anyway. Tenet was Bush's choice for DCI. The fact that he was a holdover from the Clinton administration doesn't lessen Bush's responsibility for making that choice or his responsibility for Tenet's job performance in the
months before 9-11.

The author speculates the Bushies kept Tenet on for political reasons, but offers no evidence. Furthermore, the FBI also failed. Why no mention of those failures and the responsibility for them?

And while the intelligence failures happened on Tenet's watch, it's the captain of the ship who's ultimately responsible for the failures of his crew. Even Reagan admitted to the American people that Iran-contra happened "on my watch." Reagan publicly accepted the responsibility for his administration's failure. Bush has yet to do so.

Given that the United States had been involved in combat
operations in Iraq for more than a decade, one would hope that
the first topic on President Bush's foreign policy agenda would
have been Iraq. What else would it have been?

Terrorism. As Colin Powell said in 2001, the Iraq threat was contained. Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February of 2001, "The threat from terrorism is real, it is immediate, and it is evolving." Terrorism was a greater threat.

But charging that the Bush
administration was unreasonably obsessed with overthrowing
Hussein -- given the context which the Clinton and Bush Sr.
administrations had created for them -- is truly stretching
things.

Good government involves setting priorities. It's clear the Bushies had their priorities wrong.

So too with the charge that Bush had failed to take al Qaeda
seriously. To be more precise, there had been a persistent
failure -- in both the Clinton and Bush administrations -- to
take al Qaeda and radical Islamists seriously. Part of the fault
lay directly with the CIA and the manner in which it collected
intelligence and analyzed it -- but Bush's CIA director was the
same as Clinton's. Blaming Bush for unique neglect of al Qaeda
for eight months, after Clinton's eight years, is hard to fathom.

Strawman. Who's said Bush should be blamed for "unique neglect?" Has anyone asserted that the Clinton administration is blameless?

The 8 years vs 8 months ignores Al Qaeda's gathering power as an evolving and escalating threat. The incoming Bush administration was told Al Qaeda had become a serious threat, and obviously Tenet and Clarke believed the threat had become dire during the summer of 2001. But 3 days after Bush got the August 6th PDB, he gave a national public address on embryoes, not terrorism. Woodward's quote of Bush not believing the "urgency" of the threat seems to be accurate.

The Bush failure was the same as the Clinton failure.

Nonsense. The Clinton administration had Clarke attending principals meetings, a clear indication they regarded terrorism more seriously than the Bushies. The Clinton administration thwarted several terrorist operations. What terrorist operations have the Bushies stymied? Just comparing body counts shows how asinine the statement is.

The misevaluation of al Qaeda was a systemic failure that ran
from the CIA to the American public. We recall no public outcry
for increased expenditures on intelligence and counterterrorism
in the 1990s.

Another strawman. The CIA and its product users are supposed to be better informed about terrorist threats than the public. It's the federal government's job to allocate the expenditures necessary to fulfill its primary duty of protecting the American people from enemies foreign and domestic. Given that the public has no way of knowing how much is spent on intelligence and counter-terrorism, blaming them for not clamoring for additional funding is ludicrous.

For the Clinton administration to claim that it had devoted major
resources and made a great effort to hunt down and destroy al
Qaeda is simply not true. To their credit, both former Defense
Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeline Albright
testified this week that their efforts against al Qaeda were both
thin and constrained by public disinterest. In its policy of
inaction, the Clinton team was simply tracking the American
public's mood.

Another strawman. Who in the Clinton administration has claimed it "devoted major resources and made a great effort to hunt down and destroy al Qaeda?" The author even quotes Clinton officials to answer the charge, as laughable an exercise in sophistry as I've ever seen.

Bush did fail. He failed to hold the intelligence community
responsible for its failures, tear it apart and rebuild it.

He also failed before the fact, by not marshalling the resources at his disposal to adequately address the threat that his DCI told him was immediate. A good leader in Bush's shoes would've listened to the warnings and made a serious effort to get actionable intelligence in the months before 9-11. And what kind of dimwitted leader listens to those kinds of warnings, fails to
protect the American people and then uses a funeral scene illustrating that failure in his campaign commercials? The man has no shame.

And the author of the crap you cited here doesn't have much.