Cites family as the reason why. Not surprising that another member of the Administration would step down. It has been, after all, a rather stressful time these past few years. My questions are: Who will replace him? Will he/she do a better job? Has Ridge done a good job so far? Why did he wait until Bush was in Canada before announcing his resignation?
Any thoughts, guesses or other comments?
I just hope he doesn’t run for governor again. I hated him as a governor.
He seemed to me to be someone that was good at going around cutting ribbons. I wish he hadn’t made that comment about the terrorists being aware of how much more prepared we are now. There are many candidates for the job, who are capable of doing a better job. I don’t think there is anything to read into the fact that Bush was in Canada when he made his announcement.
I found most amusing was his statement that “Can we say how many terrorist plots were thwarted? No.” In contrast, when Bill Clinton left office, he was able to list several terrorist plots thwarted under his watch.
That may be true, rjung, but I think we can all name a few terrorist plots that the Clinton administration didn’t thwart.
It might be that Ridge can’t say how many plans have been thwarted because:
There’s too many to count.
To do so could jeopardize the people doing the thwarting.
When hit with that question he refused to answer because he wasn’t prepared to give an exact number. Better to not answer the question than to make a mistake, answer wrong and get beheaded in the press over it. I can see it now, “Ridge lied, people died!”
Big deal. Long as they’re thwartin’, what’s the problem? The average Joe can either not be privy to certain issues of security, or they can tell us everything and get a few CIA agents killed in the process.
Since he doesn’t seem to be filming new espisodes for his PBS series, I’ll suggest as Ridge’s replacement Red Green. That man KNOWS duct tape.
He’s already been elected twice, so I don’t believe that he’s eligible to run again.
I notice you conveniently overlooked the most obvious answer:
Given how eager this Administration has been to trumpet the slightest sign of success on its part (“Mission accomplished,” anyone?), I daresay that any real antiterrorism accomplishments would have been announced within hours of said thwarting.
And the idea that this Administration has any concern about jepoardizing the people and agents in the field is laughably naive, as Valeria Plame will tell you.