Chris Wallace of Fox News who having no hope of ever having even half the honor of his father decides to use an interview with The Big Dog that was supposed to be about Clinton’s Global Initiative to attack him about the hunt for Bin Laden during his presidency, Friday Fight Club: Bill Clinton vs. Chris Wallace
WJC: ok, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this…arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was falsely based on the 911 comission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.
The right-wing blogger Ace of Spades is under the delusion that he was serving in Congress during the Clinton administration. Either that or he thinks his thoughts are like bright luminous rays that emit from his head and are easily read by anyone with a simple tinfoil right-wing blogger decoding device. Clinton In Red-Faced Rage Over Suggestion He Spared Bin Ladin, September 22, 2006, posted by Ace at 07:38 PM
The man simply lies. It is a breathtakingly stupid and mendacious claim that rightwingers, as he calls us, actually opposed his weak single effort to get bin Ladin. Throughout the late nineties, I was apopleptic we weren’t doing anything at all about bin Ladin. We wanted more action. Not less. ( My note :I searched for a post that was written during the first nine months that Bush was president that chastised Bush for not doing enough to get Bin Laden and what do ya know I couldn’t find one).
The pretext for this lie is that rightwingers, myself included, did in fact “question the timing” of his one attempt to kill bin Ladin. It occurred, coindentally enough, during the Lewinsky furor. On the eve of some testimony; can’t remember which, and it really doesn’t matter. ( A logical fallacy, submitting his cynicism as proof).
Conservatives did not object to this attack. We were enraged, however, that the man refused to attack bin Ladin at all until he was motivated to action by a threat to his own political safety. We were not angry he’d attacked bin Ladin; we were angry he hadn’t attacked bin Ladin before (or after, actually; anyone remember a subsequent attack?).
We were angry that the man had let bin Ladin attack us with impunity for years until he saw it as a good move politically to finally launch a poorly-timed cruise missile at bin Ladin. He was animated to action not to save American lives, but to save his own fucking political life. ( My note: another logical fallacy; where is the proof that President Clinton acted only for political reasons. Even if Clinton’s motivations were cynical does that mean that Ace would have preferred that Clinton not take action?)
– “rightwingers, as he calls us”, What can you say. Ace was down in the basement separating his red socks from his white socks and the President of the United States and the rest of America didn’t hear him when he was “apopleptic”. It has never occurred to Ace that his thoughts and opinions are not instantaneously transmitted like a sonic dog whistle into the brains of every citizen and if he had a blog during the nineties that America’s policy makes did not make a practice of reading it before making decisions that affected millions of people. Ace must be even more “apopleptic” that five years after 9-11 with his favorite prep school frat boy at the helm and “right-wingers” running every branch and department of government that Bin Laden is still free. That would as usual be one standard for Democrats and a whole other standard for conservatives. Another day and another demonstration of the vacuum that is conservative principles. Orrin hatch is one of right-wingers that President Clinton was referring to, GOP Congress blocked Clinton push for anti-terror legislation
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emerged from the meeting and said, “These are very controversial provisions that the [Clinton] White House wants. Some they’re not going to get.” .
President wants Senate to hurry with new anti-terrorism laws
President Clinton urged Congress Tuesday to act swiftly in developing anti-terrorism legislation before its August recess.
“We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue,” Clinton said during a White House news conference.
But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, doubted that the Senate would rush to action before they recess this weekend. The Senate needs to study all the options, he said, and trying to get it done in the next three days would be tough.
Other right-wingers, you know the ones in Congress as compared to Republican bloggers who think that the whole world waits anxiously for the next celestrial insights published on the “internets”, whose remarks are on the record derided President Clinton’s efforts against terrorism,
“Senators Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) swiftly voiced concern that Clinton might have acted to divert public attention from his personal problems related to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.”
On President Clinton’s efforts to get Iraq to comply with UN inspections right-wing conservatives didn’t support their commander-in-chief they hurled scurrilous accusations, Republicans skeptical of Iraq attack on eve of impeachment vote
(R-Mississippi) and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).
“I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time,” Lott said in a statement. “Both the timing and the policy are subject to question.”
“The suspicion some people have about the president’s motives in this attack is itself a powerful argument for impeachment,”
Why are right-wing bloggers having a rabid fit over the Clinton interview. There are a few reasons. Six years after he has left office Bill Clinton is still the most popular president in modern history. The Clinton years were for the most part years of peace and prosperity. As compared to the Bush years where 9-11 happened on Bush’s watch as they made going after pimps a higher priority then going after al-Queda, where they took an entire army into Afghanistan and let Bin laden get away because they outsourced the job to Pakistan and diverted resources to Iraq. ( Terroism has reached all time highs under conservative rule) The Bush years that ate up the budget surplus that Clinton left, while Bush and his handmaidens ran up the greatest debt in our history – debt that is being floated by China.
Right-wing conservative blogger Blue Crab Boulevard, The Avoidance Of Any Responsibility, 9-22-06 writes,
What is almost funny, in a sickening way, is that we are literally seeing the man unravel. First the almost foaming at the mouth attacks on The Path to 9/11 and now this. It is falling apart around him; his legacy diminishes almost daily. More and more people are paying attention to his failures. He knows it, and he is melting down under the strain.
The usual modus operandi of the rabid right. Clinton tells the truth, the fringe right’s fragile little make believe world is threatened so lash out and call the truth teller names; forget about all that fact gathering garbage. Blue Crab believed everything in The Path to 9-11 and Little Red Riding Hood. In Little Red Riding Hood there was all those facts about wolf ecology and physiology, just in the same way that The Path to 9-11 told right-wingers everything they want so desparately to believe about Bill Clinton, Despite Last Minute Re-cut ABC/Disney’s “Path to 9/11” Still rife with Misinformation, Fabrication and Misleading Scenes
The first part of the ABC miniseries The Path to 9-11, which aired on September 10, included a fabricated scene that depicts Clinton administration officials declining to authorize the CIA to capture Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. ABC retained the controversial scene despite the fact that it is contradicted by the 9-11 Commission report — which ABC originally cited as the film’s basis (although following criticism of the film’s numerous inconsistencies with the report, network officials have since minimized that claim) –
Of course this doesn’t mean anything to the wingnuttery of the blogisphere because even though the 9-11 Commission was very conservative and even its finding gave the benefit of the doubt to Bush it still did not tell them what they wanted to hear so it doesn’t really count. What counts is a Hollywood movie made by a right-winger that reassured them that the myths that they have spent years creating about the Clinton presidency are safe for now – Clinton bad, Bush is a saint. The fact is that George W. Bush was, is, and will continue to be until his last day in office a miserable inept failure. He failed to take the most rudimentary steps that may have prevented 9-11, Transcript: Bin Laden determined to strike in US
The following is a transcript of the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Parts of the original document were not made public by the White House for security reasons.
Did Bush or his staff call the airlines and tell them to start reinforcing cockpit doors? No. Did the Bush administration put even one extra US Marshall in rotation on flights in or out of our busiest airports? No. Did Bush continue to try and have good relations with the Taliban who they knew was harboring Bin Laden after the embassy attacks? Yes.
update: According to this Washington Post story the Bush administration expressed a predictable disdain for the Clinton administration’s planning in regards to Bin Laden and al-Queda in Afghanistan and talked tough, but in reality was reticent to take action – Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition
# The administration did not resume its predecessor’s covert deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships, on six-hour alert near Afghanistan’s borders. The standby force gave Clinton the option, never used, of an immediate strike against targets in al Qaeda’s top leadership. The Bush administration put no such capability in place before Sept. 11.
# At least twice, Bush conveyed the message to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime responsible for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden’s group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole – a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney – the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.
# In the spring, CIA officers traveled into northern Afghanistan to assess rebel forces commanded by Ahmed Shah Massoud. They found him worse than he had appeared the autumn before. The agency gave Massoud cash and supplies in small amounts in exchange for intelligence on al Qaeda but did not have the authority to build back his fighting strength against the Taliban.
# In his first budget, Bush spent $13.6 billion on counterterrorist programs across 40 departments and agencies. That compares with $12 billion in the previous fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget. There were also somewhat higher gaps this year, however, between what military commanders said they needed to combat terrorists and what they got. When the Senate Armed Services Committee tried to fill those gaps with $600 million diverted from ballistic missile defense, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he would recommend a veto. That threat came Sept. 9.
# On May 8, Bush announced a new Office of National Preparedness for terrorism at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At the same time, he proposed to cut FEMA’s budget by $200 million. Bush said that day that Cheney would direct a government-wide review on managing the consequences of a domestic attack, and “I will periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.” Neither Cheney’s review nor Bush’s took place.
# Bush did not speak again publicly of the dangers of terrorism before Sept. 11, except to promote a missile shield that had been his top military priority from the start. At least three times he mentioned “terrorist threats that face us” to explain the need to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
The Long Goodbye 