The Anchoress

:::UPDATED:::SCROLL DOWN FOR ORIGINAL POST:::

Update: One thing that did offend me about Clinton’s statement was that “right wingers” didn’t support him, or something like that. Annoying revision of history. Ace is still angry and he puts it to rights with this NY Times story from 1998:

Congressional leaders were briefed about the planned raid Wednesday night and Thursday morning. For the most part, Republican leaders praised Clinton’s decision and urged more aggressive action against terrorism.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed firm support, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, said, “Our response appears to be appropriate and just.”

Did some “right wingers” fuss? Yes. But the “head right wingers” supported the president as did the majority of conservatives.

But while the Republican leadership rallied to support the raids, some members of Congress reacted suspiciously, noting that the action followed by three days Clinton’s acknowledgment to the public and a grand jury of his relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

Oh, my goodness…isn’t that harsh? President Bush has never had to endure such rudeness and opposition!

Ace has more wet blankets to throw on Clinton here. I’m making a note to myself: never tick off Ace!
END UPDATE:::

Ed Morrissey has posted a very wise piece in response to all the gasps and chatter - from both sides - on Bill Clinton’s red-faced rant to Chris Wallace. He writes:

The rise of Islamofascism didn’t occur just on Clinton’s watch, and his presidency was not the only one that demonstrated weakness and fecklessness to the jihadists. One can (and should) pick out examples from the three preceding administrations. Jimmy Carter undermined the Shah and allowed Ruhollah Khomeini to seize power in Iran, and then did nothing but demonstrate impotency when Khomeini had our embassy in Teheran seized — allowing the crisis to drag on for 444 days as Khomeini’s followers held 51 Americans hostage. Ronald Reagan retreated from Lebanon after a Hezbollah attack killed hundreds of Marines, and then negotiated with them when they took hostages. George Bush kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but let him off the hook with the road to Baghdad open because he didn’t want to alienate the moderate Arab regimes that had given tacit support to the invasion.

Nor can we argue that the Bush administration took much action in the preceding months to guard against the threat from AQ, although they gave it about the same level of attention as the Clinton administration did, and mostly with the same players. Just before 9/11, a new policy on Iraq had been promulgated which recommended stricter control of the sanctions on Saddam Hussein, not military action, and he had already informed everyone that he had no interest in “nation building”, making a democratization campaign a remote possibility. Most analysts talked about cyber terrorism as the next big intelligence problem, including Richard Clarke, regardless of what he says now.

There. Bottom line: no administration ever did enough, and nobody COULD have done enough, prior to 9/11, partly because the country wasn’t paying attenion and there was no mindset to “get” bin Laden…the country and the congress would never have gotten behind the effort. Good heavens, even AFTER 9/11 look at what the Bush administration had to go through (and what it still goes through) to try to find terrorists and interrogate them. Beancounters and objectors every step of the way.

This has never been an easy issue. If, as Lt. Col. Robert Patterson wrote in his book Dereliction of Duty, Clinton simply refused to “engage” and take out bin Laden when he was in our sites, well…hindsite is always 20/20, isn’t it? We’d all be happier if he’d done it, and he’d be happier too…now…back then, who knows how everyone would have reacted.

All I know is, it is absurd for Clinton (who is the first former president in my memory to be so dependably ungenerous to his successor, even though both Bush 41 and Dubya have been consistantly gracious to him) to claim that Bush’s government should have done in 8 months what he wasn’t able to do in 8 years, or to pretend that terrorism against this nation began in January of 2001…but it is equally absurd to suggest that Clinton was the only president to not get the job done. None of them covered themselves with glory on this issue, certainly not the utterly incompetent Carter, nor Reagan, nor Bush 43, nor Clinton. Nor Dubya, in the short time he had (and let’s remember his transition was far from smooth or uncomplicated - nothing the previous administration left for him helped the “next” American president hit the ground running, or have we forgotten that? It took almost 6 months for the Democrats to finally approve Bush’s cabinet appointments!)

Anyway, pre 9/11, perhaps none of them could have. I think Clinton - who is supposed to be so smart - would be much smarter to stop wagging his finger at the Bush administration and carrying on about how much he “cared” and simply acted like a statesman and said, “it was a tough issue, and every American president since Carter did too little…”

But then he would have been smarter to let The Path to 9/11 air on ABC without freaking out, too. All he did was publicize what he would rather not. Clinton needs to stop freaking out and start acting like a former president who cares more about helping the nation to heal and come together, than about his legacy and the need to constantly divide in order to conquer.

Peggy Noonan wrote the other day that the temperature of the world is too hot. She meant, of course, the political temperature. I agree. I watched the video of Clinton carrying on last night and all I felt was very tired. I’m tired of rehashing a question that in the end no one will change their minds on. I’m tired of watching people blame each other. I’m tired of the most pressing issue of our time being treated like a mere political tool. Too many people are foaming at the mouth, on both sides. A noteable exception is President Bush, who has an awful lot on his plate and is trying to attend to it while all around him there is one idiotic skirmish after another, havoc and meltdowns left and right.

Everyone…cool yer jets! As Colbert King writes in today’s WaPo, Unless I’m mistaken, the Sept. 11 hijackers didn’t ask the doomed passengers if they were Democrats or Republicans. They didn’t care one bit if the people strapped in their seats for takeoff were liberals, conservatives or neocons.[...]Each party treats the other like a malignancy on the body politic when the real cancer is the terrorists whose malignant objective is to kill and maim, to show us how vulnerable we are, to instill fear and to bring this country to its knees. (H/T BlueCrab Boulevard.)

Quite right. There are hard feelings on both sides, and the hard feelings are going to linger for a long time, as will the distrust…but we need to really stop the partisan bickering and focus on what’s important.

As Ed wrote, I don’t necessarily disagree with Ace, either, “but as a nation we need to end this argument if we want to get some consensus on engaging the enemy, and the enemy is not Bill Clinton.”

I would only add, for the benefit of my lefty readers…the enemy is not George W. Bush, either. And retraveling this well-worn path isn’t going to help our nation or our president, or the next president.

I must say though, I am more convinced than ever that I don’t want to see another president named Clinton or Bush for a very long time. I’ve had enough of this whole Hatfield/McCoy scene. I don’t think the wide rift that exists between parties can possibly be healed - for the better of our nation - while these two families are in power.

Also writing:
Flopping Ace
RightWingNuthouse
Tom Maquire
Ann Althouse