What matters most - government policies on stem cell research or dealing with possible terrorist attacks on the United States? Most people will say the latter - but the actions of the Bush administration late in the summer of 2001 suggest that perhaps the former was more important: despite warnings of terrorists having a strong interest in attacking the United States, President Bush went on vacation then went to work promoting his policy on stem cell research.

James P. Pinkerton writes for Newsday:

Plenty of people in Washington had their "hair on fire" about the terror threat in the summer of 2001. But not Bush, apparently. On Aug. 4, he went off on a working vacation to his ranch in Texas. According to White House speechwriter turned memoirist David Frum, that summer Bush "did something I had never seen him do: he brooded." Yet the issue wasn't terror; it seems it was stem cell research. On Aug. 9, Bush gave his first primetime policy speech to the nation - on the topic of embryos. After that, according to Frum, Bush launched a "mini-political campaign" that took him out on the stump.

And we all know what happened the following month.

There are very strong arguments for the idea that the administration had enough information and enough warning to take more actions than they did. It's true that not everything can be made a priority because, in such a situation, nothing is really a priority anymore. Choices have to be made and that's a fact. Maybe at the time there good reasons for not making terrorism a priority, but the Bush administration hasn't been trying to make that argument - they have been trying to say that terrorism was a priority when it really doesn't look as though it was.

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