Bush to Nation: "Oh, By The Way....? I Totally Saved Your Asses. BOO-Ya."

From the BBC:

US President George W Bush has given details of what he said was a foiled al-Qaeda plot to fly a plane into the tallest building on the US west coast.

Mr Bush said the plan - uncovered in 2002 - involved using shoe bombs to blow open the plane's cockpit door.

Planning began in October 2001, but it was derailed in early 2002 "when a South East Asian nation arrested a key al-Qaeda operative", Mr Bush said.

The plot was finally thwarted in the summer of 2003, when the suspected head of JI, an Indonesian known as Hambali, was arrested in Thailand.

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that while Mr Bush plainly meant to warn Americans of the continuing danger posed by international terrorism, the only really new detail was that of the shoe bombs.

It comes as the White House is under pressure from some of the president's own supporters to be more aggressive in talking up the successes of intelligence gathering, our correspondent says.

Some people are saying that the President's revealing of this attack now is a blatant attempt to diffuse criticism of his wire-tapping program. Others have said it was simply to divert our attention from Gonzales' questioning about said-program. I don't particularly care about the motivations, really.

But here's something I do care about: being distracted. The willingness to distract indicates an awareness that what you're attempting to distract me from is probably not something I'd approve of. Or agree with. Or find legal, just, or democratic. It indicates an awareness that what you're doing is probably going to be percieved as wrong.

Of course, there's also the simple argument that Bush is simply bringing this plot up in order to show the necessity of wiretapping, or show that through his efforts, terrorism has been thwarted (therefore implicitly arguing that we should let him wiretap - because he knows what he's doing).

But nothing in the recounting indicates that wiretapping played any sort of significant role in capturing these terrorists. And in our current political climate, where there are (right or wrong) quite a few people who think Bush is royally pounding the poodle at his job, you'd think that a successful operation like this would have been trumpeted by the administration. Wouldn't the public knowledge that we'd foiled an attack have lifted our spirits (it sure would have lifted mine)? Wouldn't it have told terrorists, both current and potential, that the U.S. is not to be funked with?

Where's the logic in this?