Clinton agreed to go on Fox News Sunday and be interviewed, partly about his Clinton Global Intiative, and part as a free-for-all which naturally drifted to talking about bin Laden. To put it mildly, Clinton got a bit peeved. ThinkProgress with the transcript.

CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever…

Wow. The man is fired up. Now, this got me thinking about the two men’s track records when it comes to their anti-terrorism efforts. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1) The WTC was bombed in February of 1993, nary a month after Clinton had been sworn in. America was not attacked after that, and no wars had to be waged. Another attack didn’t occur until he was out of office and the country was in another man’s hands.

2) Republicans now who blame 9/11 on Clinton now back in 1998 accused him of “Wag the Dog” distraction. They said he was using the air strikes to appear “presidential” for a day. They said he used it to draw attention away from Monica.

3) Let’s not forget Alec Station, which I’ve written about previously. Created in 1996 to find and capture bin Laden, dismantled in 2005 under Bush.

4) Logically, if the republicans are so accusatory of Clinton, and had been yelling and screaming that he was so negligent, that would mean that as soon as Bush took office it would be business-time and they’d start busting their asses to stop the terrorist threat. Was that the case? Well, no, Bush took around 42% of his days on vacation until 9/11 happened.

5) Following from point #1, the 1993 WTC bombing was about a month after Clinton took office. 9/11 was roughly nine months after Bush took office. One of these men had plenty of time to realize the threat and diffuse it. I’m not sure I need to mention the August 6th memo again.

6) A while ago, John Kerry joked that bin Laden would die of kidney failure before Bush ever got him. It doesn’t seem he was that far off, as there’s a (currently unconfirmed) report claiming that bin Laden is gravely ill or already dead from typhoid fever.

There hasn’t been an attack after the initial one during either presidency. Neither of them caught him and it looks like disease had to take the man down. To this extent, both presidents are fairly equal. However, one of these presidents waged a war in an unrelated nation, is trying to re-write the laws of the land, and has managed to drive more support towards the terrorists along the way. Take a guess which one that is.

A little food for thought, everyone.

[tags]terrorism, bush, clinton, media, al qaeda, bin laden, 9/11[/tags]

I cannot figure out why the media seems so surprised by this. I’ve seen at least four articles making a big deal that democrats are speaking out against Hugo Chavez’s labelling of Bush as “the devil” with his whole “it still smells like sulfur” remark.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., whose state also participates in the program, called the comments “destructive to the United Nations as an institution” and said Chavez should face a rebuke.

… 

“But you don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and you don’t condemn my president,” [Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.] said.

Why does everyone act like this is unexpected? Even the most vehement Bush critic isn’t calling him Satan and that he spews sulfur. More than that, he’s OUR president. Like Rangel said, you don’t march into our country and call our president names like that. That’s common damn decency, you just don’t launch massive insults against the leaders of another country if you expect to be taken seriously.
Though, granted, we’ve got our people calling a few of the Middle Eastern leaders equivalents of Hitler and Stalin. Just not at the UN.

[tags]united nations, hugo chavez[/tags]