Who dropped the ball on 9/11?

Bush did, that's who.
Watching the coverage of the horrible Russian school disaster, I noted that a lot of the parents are blaming Putin for the disaster. Unfairly, perhaps -- but Putin promised, apparently, to keep them safe two or three years ago and now its proven that he did not.
So why has Bush been let off the hook so throughly on 9/11? The media completely accepted Condi's "but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" line. The reason Bush was so opposed to the 9/11 commission was his fear that they would blame him for the attacks -- and they should have. It has now been proven that he had plenty of warning, with plenty of people running around with their hair on fire for months before it happened.
It's easy to see now how simple it would have been to stop 9/11 -- if, in mid-July, they had increased airline security by banning knives on planes, that would have done it. And if they had also, in August, followed up on the Presidential Daily Brief by pulling together all those on-going FBI and CIA investigations, that would have done it, too.
Now, you can argue that no one then could have known how easy it would have been to disrupt the 9/11 attack. But they knew that something big was being planned. And they failed to take some pretty obvious steps to increase protection for the American people.
Richard Clarke was right to apologize to the 9/11 families -- he WAS at fault. But so, even more so, was the rest of the Bush administration.
9/11 is back on the public stage now, because the republicans put it there during their convention.
So I wonder now if America will begin to reexamine its 9/11 meme, where the fall of the towers has been talked about as though it was a completely unexpected act of god. And I wonder if they will begin to realize that while Al Quada was to blame for 9/11, the Bush administration should have stopped it but didn't because they dropped the ball.