Gosh, how creative! I’m devastated. It must have taken you hours to come up with that.
You are well on your way to being a wit. Half-way, at least.
How can I miss you if you won’t go away? :d
Really, RT, this is the second time running where I have refused to play your dishonest semantic games, and you have tried this trick of drawing up the rags of your offended dignity and stalking off. If you were able actually to bring it off, you might have retained some shreds of it. But to post immediately, and with such a weak-ass piece of meaningless invective without a scrap of creativity - not so much.
Nice. Can you explain to whoever’s still paying attention to you what’s a semantic game about this?
First of all, it’s one thing to stalk off in lieu of a reply. That’s not been the case here.
I’ve established my points: Clinton was hardly ‘doing nothing’ about terrorism while in office, and Bush failed to meet a very reasonable test in terms of his response. You’ve decided to play games rather than rebutting.
Second, like I said, “Otherwise, I don’t have the time for you.” (Shame about that reading problem of yours; sadly, you can’t tell the difference between “if you don’t do A, I’ll do B” and “I’m doing B.”)
At any rate, now I have stuck around long enough to be as assured as I can be that you will not respond to the substance of posts 58 and 70; now I no longer have the time for you.
A Ron Suskind piece in the print (not online) version of the October 2000 Washington Monthly reports that Bush was briefed in September 2000 on future threats to the USA by a group including John E. McLaughlin, then Acting Deputy Director of the CIA. (Apparently this briefing is done routinely for the major parties’ Presidential nominees.) In this briefing, Bush was warned that bin Laden would likely kill Americans on his watch if he won. (My copy of the magazine’s at home; I’ll bring quotes tonight.)
Just one more of the steady drumbeat of warnings Bush got about bin Laden even before the 8/6/01 PDB.
I assume the claim is that bin Laden would attack if Bush won, not bin Laden or McLaughlin. Thus a couple of points -[ul][li]You make it sound as if McLaughlin claimed that the 9/11 operation would have been cancelled if Gore had won. What is the basis for this? It doesn’t sound reasonable, since all the planning and preparation for the 9/11 attacks had been carried out already (on the Clinton-Gore watch, it need hardly be said). [*]Is there any record of Bush responding as a reasonable person might be expected to - “Then why the fuck haven’t you done anything about him?”[/ul]The same question I have been asking all along.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, but if you parse it that way (and I agree that it is the writer’s most likely intended meaning), then Shodan gets deprived of a straw man to set up and knock down.
Admit it, Shodan, you’re just pushing RTFirefly’s buttons because you can, right?
And this would be apropos of what, exactly? What you have had Bush do, sweep in and attack simply because Clinton’s team said bin Laden might kill Americans on his watch.
As opposed to what, the steady drumbeat of actual deadly attacks on Americans during Clinton’s watch which resulted in little more than stern words and bombing an aspirin factory?
Are you sure you and Shodan aren’t each other’s sock puppet? I don’t think either of you is a real human being.
This illustrates the value of reading the thread. As noted in my recent posts to the dear, departed Shodan, I’ve been making two cases: (1) that Clinton wasn’t exactly doing nothing about terrorists (see post 58), and (2) Bush’s actions in responding to the terrorist threat, pre-9/11, were well short of any reasonable expectation based on the warnings he got (see post 70).
Clearly this is apropos of (2), since this identifies yet one more high-level warning.
1995 Oklahoma City bombing: Clinton caught the ringleader, Tim McVeigh, who was later executed.
1996 Khobar Towers bombing: Iran was apparently behind this one, and the ringleaders are apparently there. I’m willing to concede that by the time he left office, four and a half years later, Clinton had failed to bring the ringleaders to justice.
1998 Embassy bombings: Clinton tried to kill bin Laden with a cruise missile; meanwhile, the GOP helped out by calling ‘wag the dog’ and continuing to make war on Clinton over a blowjob. Apparently the GOP, even after the embassy bombings, considered Clinton’s penis to be a greater threat to national security than they regarded bin Laden to be.
1999/2000 Millennium bombings: Clinton kept them from happening. Only at this point did we have repeat business from the same attacker.
2000 USS Cole bombing: bin Laden connection verified too late to act before Bush’s inauguration. Fortunately, the evidence on this could be handed over to Bush’s experienced foreign policy team of Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld, who wouldn’t need a lot of time to figure out what to do.
I’m trying to figure out how this, taken as a whole, makes Clinton look bad. You can pick on individual instances (e.g. Khobar Towers) but he stopped one attack, and captured the people responsible for two more. Bush hasn’t yet caught the man responsible for the only attack that matters, despite having had twice as much time, and having been able to put 20,000 troops into Afghanistan - which would have been politically impossible for Clinton.
Also:
Americans dead in the aforementioned attacks by Islamic terrorists during the Clinton years: 54.
Americans killed by American right-wing terrorists at OKC in 1995: 168.
People killed by Islamic terrorists in America on 9/11: 2,997, mostly Americans.
Again, I’m trying to figure out why Clinton is the one who comes off worse here.
Uh, no…actually, McVeigh was caught the morning of the bombing by Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Charles Hanger, who stopped McVeigh for having no tag on his car and arrested him for carrying a loaded weapon. The FBI, having connected McVeigh with the Ryder truck that carried the explosives, discovered that he was still being held in a small town jail in Oklahoma on the weapons charge and took custody of him at that time. The rest is history, with Clinton’s sole contribution being to issue a statement praising law enforcement and promising to seek the death penalty for those responsible.
Because he passed up, for political reasons, several opportunities to kill or capture or arrest or take custody of bin Laden. Had he chosen to do the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing, the 9/11 attacks would not have occurred, and we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan and Iraq now.
Did it happen on his watch? Yes. If US troops had tracked down and caught bin Laden back in 2001 or 2002 when they should have, I’d have attributed that to Bush, even though his sole contribution would have been giving orders from afar.
When come back, bring cites.
And to the extent that these opportunities occurred prior to the embassy bombings of 1998, include an explanation of why Clinton should have regarded him as a more serious threat then, than Bush did during the first eight months of 2001 when he’d already attacked two of our embassies and one of our naval vessels.
That’s an interesting claim: that we’re in Iraq now on account of Clinton’s failure to kill or capture bin Laden.
At this point, that doesn’t even need refuting; it’s just oft-refuted bullshit.
