It's Official: Bill Clinton Did 9/11
It's Official: Bill Clinton Did 9/11
Bill Clinton's Presidency: Jan. 20, 1993 – Jan. 20, 2001; Sept. 11, 2001
It has long been the position of the Republican Party that 9/11 was the worst thing to ever happen to America, at least until Barack Obama was elected president (twice). But the party has never been comfortable with the FACT that George Dubya Bush was president that day. And the FACT that he was too busy dry-drunk vacationing on his ranch to give a damn about the warning of an imminent attack. And the FACT that he appeared too scared shitless, when he was informed of the attack, to get the fuck up from his chair and do something. (That's a video you can watch.)
The absurd claim -- one might even go so far as to call it an outright despicable LIE, and we are precisely that kind of one -- that George Bush Kept Us SafeTM, so long as you don't count the worst thing that ever happened to America, has circulated for years. But it's really come back into fashion since George's dumb baby brother decided to bring it up every chance he gets , since speaking Mexican at Donald Trump isn't helping him
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Fox News, eager as always to help, has taken up the cause of scoffing at the "lunatic left" for spreading the "conspiracy theory" that Bush was president on 9/11, which, although "technically accurate," is not relevant to the larger point of how Bush kept us safeafter 9/11. And, most importantly, if you insist on blaming anyone for the terrorist attack that happened on Bush's watch, the obvious culprit is Bill Clinton.
And the Republican Party, it would seem, has decided to officially embrace this far more convenient narrative. Like so:
PETER JOHNSON JR (FOX LEGAL ANALYST): You know, a lot of folks over time have said that if any political figure blew it in terms of preventing the 9/11 disaster, if you were to point to any figure, then it would be Mr. Clinton and his presidency. [...]
SEAN HANNITY: I'd actually put more [blame] on the Clinton administration myself, especially based on what Clinton himself has admitted.
And:
MEGHAN MCCAIN: I have the utmost respect for President George W. Bush. I do believe he kept this country safe. I think if anything, we should maybe be looking at the Clinton administration's role in 9/11. President Bush hadn't been president for that long[.]
Of course, we'd expect nothing less from the spawn of the evil som'bitch Sen. John McCain, who (let us Never Forget) said Bush deserved "some credit" for the "victory" of our combat troops leaving Iraq -- in 2010. Funny sense of timing, that McCain clan.
It's not just idiots on Fox News, though. It's also idiots running for president who've decided that if anyone is to blame for the total intelligence failure that led to 9/11, it is certainly not Bush, because that, as New York Rep. Peter King recently explained, "would be the same as saying President Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor." (And no, King did then not explain why what happened in Benghazi is obviously, by the exact same logic, not President Obama's fault. But you knew that.)
The truth is that George W. Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who were not doing a very good job and were siloing off and not sharing information across agencies, including a government under President Clinton that had not taken seriously al Qaeda and the threat that they posed, even after the USS Cole, even after the first Trade Center bombings, and all of the other challenges that we faced around world.
President Bush was only in office nine months when this happened.
Perhaps the occasional senator from Florida has been hanging out with Meghan McCain to further his popularity with the youth vote he thinks he's got nailed.
And here is Jeb! explaining why Bill Clinton really screwed the pooch on Osama bin Laden:
I think there's two ways to look at Islamic terrorism. One is a threat that has to be taken out as it relates to, you know, creating a strategy that calls it a war, or we view it as a law enforcement operation where people have rights. I think the Clinton administration made a mistake of thinking bin Laden had to be viewed from a law enforcement perspective.
At the risk of being pointedly redundant, Jeb has said his brother -- who used the word "war" many times but still failed to get bin Laden -- did everything right, which is how he, unlike Clinton, protected us from 9/11:
The simple fact is that when we were attacked, my brother created an environment where for 2,600 days we were safe. No one attacked us again. And he changed the laws, he did everything necessary, united the country and he kept us safe.
But then Jeb said President Obama has the same bad-thinking problem Clinton had, with his insufficient bloodlust for MORE WAR, so you can see how easy it is to blame Obama for any terrorists attacks on his watch, which could not have happened since George Bush made us so gosh darned safe, we were never terrorist-attacked again.
Now that Fox News has committed itself to spreading the word that Clinton did 9/11, pass it on, we expect to see other presidential candidates embrace this One Weird Trick with deep-throated enthusiasm. Bill did the first 9/11, Hillz did the Benghazi one. Better put a Republican in the White House, because that's the only way to keep America safe.
[ Media Matters / RightWingWatch / TPM / WaPo ]