Common Sense

I’ve watched the Chris Wallace Fox News interview of Bill Clinton on several news shows the past few days and I have to make a few points.

Several people on Monday’s Countdown wondered aloud why Bill Clinton would try to shift the argument onto Terrorism, which is the Republicans’ strong suit. If Democrats talk about Iraq they can win, that’s the conventional wisdom. Of course, it’s bullshit. President Clinton’s words point to exactly why Republicans shouldn’t be ceded the terrorism ground. They have done exactly zero to stop the spread of militant Islam, in fact, they’ve done more to put us into danger. The NIE that was partially-declassified this weekend says as much.

While they’ve put us into the worst possible place with the war in Iraq, they’ve also made us less safe. They aren’t better on terrorism, it’s just that every fuck up isn’t reported and cable news is more interested in Clinton losing his temper than what he lost his temper over.

Everything Clinton said was factually accurate. The Bush administration did absolutely nothing to respond to the Cole bombing and all the FBI intelligence and CIA briefings that warned about an impending attack all happened in summer 2001. Not to mention the demoting of Richard Clarke, the top counterterrorism official in the country because he wanted to keep talking to the NSC and Sec. Rice about Osama bin Laden. As far as I know, he’s still the only person who had a position in the Bush White House on 9/11 who apologized for failing to stop it. President Bush certainly hasn’t. He almost doesn’t recognize he was president before Sept. 12, 2001.

He has failed us so many times and so often that no one should give him a pass, and we finally had someone point that out this weekend. And we had to have Keith Olbermann point out that someone pointed it out because the rest of the media is too weak and too inept to do the job they are supposed to do.

On Monday’s Scarborough Country, there was talk about whether or not it was intentional or whether or not Chris Wallace is a right-wing hack. Joe didn’t think so. I have to say, Chris Wallace has come up before, to my recollection, as having given light, fluffy interviews to Bush White House people and then asking the former Democratic president if he’s sorry for not preventing 9/11. It’s just absurd to think that the guy who was president at the time and the 8 months prior to the attack doesn’t need to be asked the same question as rigorously, or whether we need to disinterr FDR and ask him, too, since he was technically president before 9/11.

The central premise of Joe’s segment was whether or not it was an intentional emotional explosion. Just to put my opinion out there, I think it was a real loss of temper, and I think it was fully justified. No one can remain calm when they see the insanity that our country is devolving into. No sane person can look at the primetime news and not be sickened. If you can see senators arguing over whether it should be the policy of the United States to torture detainees. If you can see the man who failed to protect us on 9/11 stand up and say he’s the only one who can save us and everyone else is too weak. If you can remember what the past 5 years and find it amazingly different from what our elected officials tell us happened. If you can do all that and not scream at the top of your lungs, then I’m worried about you.

There’s going to be a difference of opinion. There are going to be people who disagree about the right path to take to end the chapter in world history where Muslim radicals inflict terror on the world to promote a warped view of God. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, in this America. We have a political party that rules every branch, and I mean rules, while rewriting what the American ideal and what American history is. They are rewriting the very definition of patriotism to suit their own narrow needs. And they are doing everything to stifle dissent that they can.

At the very moment in history where we are truly open and ready to stop Islamic radicals and other terror groups, we are being led by people of an authoritarian bent. People who view 1984 as a template rather than a warning. These people are just as fanatical and just as ideological as the enemy we face, and that is scary. When we need real leadership and we need to formulate real strategies, our political figures formulated the strategy, and have yet to deviate from it, before we ever knew who the enemy was. We’ve got a pile of evidence and every thread of logic that tells us what our government is doing is wrong, and the last chance we have to stop this madness is this November.

President Clinton had to say what he had to say. And all of the preceding needed to be said.