I mean, obviously martin above and I don’t agree - but I can respect the guy for not being an idiot. Man that’s sad.

jennifer juniper

who is predicting a clinton/obama ticket for 2008

I liked your point about holding the voters responsible, because if a general election is not a test for whether or not the lefties who would agree with any easy stand against war, Republicans in office, and so on have any compelling case, then it is compelling apparently only when the anti-war faction wins.

Bush shouldn’t have reverse-argued his case from an updated and improved neo-conclusion.

So the difference, I guess, between the revisionists who celebrate and pine for the Clinton administration and blame Bush, and the revisionists who change the reasons for this admitted quagmire, is that the latter can do so strategically if campaigning for votes, and with a clear conscience if voting. This discussion reminds me of the Wallace/Clinton (Bill) interview, and all the people who act like Wallace had his ass handed to him, rather than the other way around. People don’t know classy journalism when they see it, and the whole art of making history as partisan as possible irritates me.

That is why it’s probably better if Obama gets the nomination on that side, even though his political capital is more invested finishing off an irrelevant OBL. I appreciated cephyn’s Obama quote, to end on a conciliatory note.

Ultimately, I view attempts to pin this on the Bush administration as extreme revisionism. Blame runs so deep; the Clinton camp didn’t aggressively chase Osama after the Cole bombing, and presidents before him did nothing to fight terrorism in the Arab world. To the American people, terrorism was a non-issue on 9/10/2001.

Much like the argument that Roosevelt could have prevented Pearl Harbor, this argument doesn’t hold water.

“In a White House briefing on August 6, 2001, President Bush was informed of the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda in a memorandum entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”. Critics allege that these warnings were ignored.”
” Simply put, terrorism was not a priority for the Bush administration during the first nine months of 2001. As former Bush administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke told the 9/11 Commission investigating the attacks in 2004: “To the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you.”"
“the CIA sent President Bush a daily intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001, saying the agency had “detected patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings,” no one in the administration acted on the report.”
“In an August 31, 2001, speech Bush gave to celebrate the launch of the White House’s new web site, national security was last on a list of major issues Bush planned to deal with, according to a transcript of his speech.”
” Yet even top officials in the Clinton administration, whom President Bush and his senior aides have blamed over the years for not being tough in fighting al-Qaeda during their tenure in office, warned the new administration that al-Qaeda was determined to strike inside the US. President Bush, it seems, heeded the warning, appointing Cheney to head a task force to “combat terrorist attacks on the United States.” But the task force never met, according to the 9/11 Commission report.”
“For longtime counter-terrorism officers, the fact that the White House was not taking threats from al-Qaeda seriously started to take its toll. During the summer of 2001, the counter-terrorism officers who were privy to intelligence reports on al-Qaeda threats “were so worried about an impending disaster that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns”

Sorry. That’s a failure of the administration. They could have stopped this without invading Afghanistan. Instead, they screwed up, then invaded Afghanistan…and screwed that up too.

PS: pinning this all on Bush’s head is both unfair and historical revisionism. Blame it on the American voters. We would never have been willing to engage Afganastan and get Bin Laden until the towers came down. None of us believed that terrorism was that serious a threat. Hell, we still don’t.