This Modern World has a nice item about the upcoming “National Preparedness Month”, scheduled to be kicked off by Tom Ridge on September 9th.
Per TMW:
Why September 9th? That’s awfully late, if it’s supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year’s 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on the date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it’ll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.
The idea, obviously, is to throw a large amount of focus, possibly for weeks on end, on the only issue on which Bush outpolls Kerry. And of course this will come on the heels of the GOP convention. So where the Democrats’ post-convention media got blitzed with terror warnings based on years-old intelligence, the Republicans’ afterglow might well be favorably extended.
Indeed. But here’s the real point of the whole thing (emphasis original):
It’s three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.
And yes, let’s ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?