What Obama didn’t say on Letterman

Question: What would you have done differently had you been president on September 11th seven years ago?

‘George Bush took his eye off our attackers by invading Iraq. But he also split this country down the middle and said if you didn’t agree with everything the Republicans said and did, you were somehow un-American. He said the enemy isn’t bin Laden, it’s Europe and half the American people. I don’t believe that.

‘Bush and the Republicans said they knew what to do, and if you didn’t agree, you were somehow disloyal. You didn’t put ‘Country First’.

‘They turned us against each other in time of war. That was wrong.

‘They turned 9/11 into a partisan battle cry and dressed up every failed policy as a patriotic litmus test, with half the country failing it.

‘They wanted you to think that Tom Daschle was as dangerous as the Taliban. In fact, a lot of the time they seemed more worried about Tom Daschle than about Osama bin Laden, and they said you should be too. They won elections that way for a while, but the Taliban are doing better than ever.

‘Another thing, Dave, is that I wouldn’t have sold America’s soul by making the torture of defenseless detainees official policy. They got a lot of dubious intelligence from that, and they believed it all because they wanted desperately to justify the invasion of Iraq. But we lost the moral high ground, I don’t care how many Christian beliefs we candidates profess.

‘In short, I would have been a leader for all Americans, not just those who agreed with everything I did. I think we’d be better off today’.