The big dog barks back
Well, after the orgy of "Clinton left us all vulnerable to terror" talk around 9/11, the man himself has spoken in his own defense. One of the many transcripts you can find on the web is here.
A couple of thoughts...
It's interesting to note that Clinton never tries to absolve himself of ultimate responsibility: "I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get Bin Laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could."
But he does point out some uncomfortable truths for revisionists who want to paint the Clinton years as a time of ignoring terrorists: if you want to argue that Clinton didn't take it seriously enough (a tough argument, I think, much tougher than "he didn't do enough"), you're stuck dealing his political rivals, now in power, who clearly took it far less seriously than he did, and (as he points out) complained that he was too obsessed with Osama bin Laden.
When Clinton was president I found him often disappointing and often infuriating. What he had, though, that the current crop of Democrats mostly lack, is an ability to make his point clearly - as he did the other day.
Over at the National Review's web site, there's a bizarre rebuttal of sorts from Byron York that complains that (as Clinton said) he tried to get bin Laden, and he failed, and therefore, apparently, all Republicans are off the hook for everything.
York's complaint was that Clinton tried to get the military to buy in to his desire to get bin Laden, and when he couldn't accomplish that, he should have just ordered them to do it, but didn't. York does mention the political pressure that the GOP-led Congress put on Clinton - can you imagine the screaming we would have heard from that side of the aisle if Clinton had ordered such a thing over the advice of his own military and intelligence advisors?
(Cheap shot: what do you call a president who orders military action against the advice of his knowledgeable advisors? George W. Bush.)
York's point seems to be that Clinton should have just forged ahead, but didn't. It's one thing to make that argument while acknowledging that the rest of the players in Washington are also culpable for what was going on then. (It's a strange thing to write about, though, since in making that argument he would be agreeing with what Clinton has said about himself.)
But York doesn't seem interested in that; the point seems to be that we should give everybody else a pass (and today we should trust them).
This will probably have changed by the time you click the link to the story, but right now the banner at the top of the page with York's article is an ad saying that MoveOn.org is trying to make us all pledge allegiance to the flag of the UN. It's a measure of how far the National Review, once a serious publication, has fallen almost as much as York's article is.
Ann Coulter has the strange distinction of being the only person I'm aware of fired by NR for being too conservative. They acted too quickly, I think; her spirit seems to live on there.
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