Tom Ridge has been on TV recently flacking for his new book, The Test of Our Times, about his tenure as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Among other appearances, yesterday, he braved the "Rachel Maddow Show," and today he was interviewed by Chris Matthews, on "Hardball." Speaking of balls, Ridge has a couple, putting his head (to mix anatomical cliches) between the jaws of these two liberal lions. He was trying to coax the hottest sentence in the book, "I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?' "-- which was about the pressure to raise the threat level a week before the 2004 election -- into meaning something other than what it obviously meant. Namely, that the threat-level elevation was at least in part an effort to help scare people into reelecting George Bush. On both programs he was speaking a mile a minute, like a kid lying about breaking a window, torturing his syntax as if it were an al-Qaeda suspect in Guantanamo -- no deer ever looked more afraid of any headlights than Ridge did in the glare of these TV studio lights.
Why isn't he standing by what he has written? It must be pressure once again, as it was in that 2004 meeting. It was so pathetically unconvincing that Matthews took pity on him and tried to help him figure out a way to save a bit of face. He said something like, "I think you've been consistent and now what you're doing is presenting a different viewpoint." It was embarrassing -- a microcosm of the vast cosmos of denial and mendacity that characterized that presidency. At least Ridge had the decency to squirm, and thus give himself away. The way that he said that he didn't mean what he said showed me that he did.
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