Bubba's meltdown

[Seascamp]

The failure to pick-off Osama Ben Laden when we had the chance cost thousands of lives and the slaughter continues. However, to not recognize the larger intel failures of the 90?s and plug the gaps will ultimately pick us off, all of us. WJC?s battle over legacy is his, and all the ?could of and should of? leveraging isn?t going to change the stark realities that have been on the plate for over three decades.

WJC?s Achilles heal is his personal and political vanity n? ego and all this huf n? puff bandy rooster stuff is very unbecoming and disingenuous. I?d say that those who wish to recognize him for other qualities such as they are or perceived to be, just do it, but not as one committed to facing the raging storm and doing a heck of a lot about it.

Failure to take on his real antagonists; Hollywood and NBC Liberals, is vintage WJC. He sent Harry Reid on the mission to go beat them up and threaten them, but choose to spleen vent in a totally different venue and well away from the Hollywood-NBC fray. That exercise is tissue thin but again, vintage WJC and the definition of the briar patch we found our selves in. I'm for fairness to our contrymen, and that's is good as it gets.

Scamp

[SuperScout]

It's just like old times. Bill Clinton delivers an impassioned speech, and within 24 hours the Web is bristling with documentation establishing that nearly every sentence was a lie.

The glassy-eyed Clinton cultists are insisting their idol's on-air breakdown during a "Fox News Sunday" interview with Chris Wallace was a calculated performance, which is a bit like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "planned demolition." Like an Osama tape, they claim he was sending a signal to Democrats to show them how to treat Republicans. Listen up, Democrats: Let's energize the undecideds by throwing a hissy fit on national television!

The Clintonian plan for action apparently entails inventing lunatic conspiracy theories, telling lots of lies, shouting, sneering, interrupting and telling your interlocutor, "(Y)ou've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever" ? all for asking a simple question. To wit: "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaida out of business when you were president?" The only thing Clinton forgot to say to Wallace was, "You'd better put some ice on that."

Let me be the first to welcome Chris Wallace to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! If the son of Mike Wallace is a member, can Chelsea be far behind?

According to Wallace, Clinton's aide, Jay Carson, demanded that the interview be stopped a few minutes into Clinton's tantrum ? just before the part where he threw the lamp at Wallace. The last time Clinton got that red in the face, the encounter ended with a stained dress. Even Muslims thought Clinton overreacted. But the Clinton Kool-Aid drinkers tell us this was a masterfully planned set-piece by their leader.

I also think Jessica Savitch's slurred, incoherent broadcast on "NBC Nightly News" in October 1983 was intentional. Others say it was drug-addled breakdown that ended her career, but obviously Savitch intended to speak in garbled gibberish on air as a brilliantly executed prelude to her death in a ditch weeks later.

And when Stephen Colbert did a routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner that bombed, I think he planned it that way.

Then there was Capt. Joseph Hazelwood's meticulously planned off-loading of 11 million gallons of crude oil off the Exxon Valdez.

Clinton shouted so many lies during his televised meltdown, only the World Wide Web can capture them all. These are just a few.

Clinton yelled at Wallace: "What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to 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."

This is so crazy it's worthy of an Air America caller. Clinton has consistently misrepresented the presidential directive about political assassinations. Clinton did not order bin Laden assassinated. He did not even lift the ban on intelligence agencies attempting to assassinate bin Laden.

What he did was lift the ban on political assassinations ? provided that assassinating bin Laden was not the purpose of the mission. So if U.S. forces were engaged in an operation to capture bin Laden, but accidentally killed him, they would not be court-martialed.

Clinton said, "All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much ? same people." As proof, he cites his humiliating withdrawal from Somalia, claiming, "They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in 'Black Hawk down,' and I refused to do it."

He added, as if it mattered, "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with 'Black Hawk down.'" In fact, what Republicans objected to was Clinton's transforming a U.N. mission in Somalia to prevent mass starvation into a much grander "nation building" exercise ? something the Democrats now hysterically support in Darfur and oppose in Iraq.

Democrats long to see American mothers weeping for their sons lost in a foreign war, but only if the mission serves absolutely no national security objectives of the United States. If we are building a democracy in a country while also making America safer ? such as in Iraq ? Democrats oppose it with every fiber of their being.

When Clinton's "nation building" in Somalia led to the brutal killing of 18 Americans, some of whose corpses were then dragged through the streets, Clinton did what the Democrats are currently demanding we do in Iraq: He cut and ran.

Republicans didn't like that either, and it had nothing to do with whether it was al-Qaida we were running from. It could have been Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al-Dawa or the Viet Cong. We ran, and the terrorists noticed.

Osama bin Laden told "ABC News" in 1998 that America's humiliating retreat from Somalia emboldened his jihadists: "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."

If this is the message that Clinton is hoping to telegraph to the American people, I hope the voters are listening.

[SuperScout]

Former President Bill Clinton, never one to let truth stand in the way of a good line, has decided to reincarnate himself as our tough, anti-terror President. The man who ran away from military service and displayed striking contempt for our armed forces has now announced that he did more - and would do more - to combat Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda than anyone else. In his view, he should be recognized as the best man to fight that enemy.

Speaking to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Clinton made a bevy of startlingly anti-factual remarks. He announced, for instance, that conservatives had criticized him for obsessing about bin Laden during his presidency - rather than the truth that he was roundly condemned for doing next to nothing about this serious threat to American security. Clinton blamed the Bush Administration for failing to stop the al-Qaeda terrorists before 9/11, saying that the Administration had eight months to get bin Laden and didn't. That conveniently overlooks that Clinton 's Administration had eight years to do that job, with al-Qaeda using the last two of those years to plan 9/11.

One of Clinton 's bigger whoppers was this declaration about the fight against bin Laden: "I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have 20,000 more troops [in Afghanistan ] trying to kill him." The man who was in the Soviet Union demonstrating against the American military during Vietnam, who as President left our armed forces short on so many fronts, now is - in his own 20/20 hindsight - The Defense President. Now he criticizes the Bush Administration for not doing enough, proclaims himself the champion of effective military action, and implies none too subtly that the fight against terrorism would go better if we had a Clinton in the White House instead of a Bush.

This isn't mere spin. It's full-scale invention. Before anyone starts taking our most recent ex-President too seriously, let's review the bidding. Clinton wasn't the President who ordered the armed forces to go after bin Laden without reservation, to get him "dead or alive." He wasn't the one who sent thousands of troops after al-Qaeda and nations that harbor and support terrorists. Instead, President Clinton responded to attacks on our troops in Somalia by withdrawing, and responded to attacks by al-Qaeda on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya by bombing the aspirin factory of an
innocent pharmaceutical firm in Sudan . He reacted to al-Qaeda's bombing of the USS Cole by lobbing a few cruise missiles at empty tents in the desert. He turned down Sudanese offers to cooperate in tracking down and capturing bin Laden.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded that - far from doing more than anyone to kill the brutal murderer who now is the international face of terrorism - President Clinton had flatly refused to allow the military or CIA to kill Osama bin Laden. Clinton 's instructions were that bin Laden should be taken, if at all, alive not dead. CIA officials reported that this instruction cut the chance of success in half. That is not to say that the Clinton Administration wasn't in a better position to eliminate bin Laden.

Evidence before the Commission showed that the Clinton Administration had live footage of Osama bin Laden at a camp in Afghanistan in the Fall of 2000, a year before the 9/11 attacks, but didn't act. NBC's Tom Brokaw, playing the tape on-air in 2004, noted rightly that this was an enormous opportunity lost. Having gotten bin Laden in your sights isn't something to brag about if you weren't willing to pull the trigger. Clinton , like all presidents, had some top-notch advisers, including some thoughtful advisers on military and foreign affairs. But he is quintessentially a temporizer, one who always has had difficulty reaching a conclusion and sticking to it, and not someone who was terribly interested in either preserving our military power or using it effectively in world affairs. He'd much rather talk one on one with world leaders, persuaded he could convince them to do what he wanted by the concerted application of charm.

Talk and compromise - not clear moral principles and the will to do whatever is needed to support them - were the hallmarks of the Clinton Administration, reflecting the person at the top. Nothing Clinton says now can change that, though he still evinces conviction that he can talk us into anything - just as he thought he could when he denied point blank having had anything to do with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton always has been the one who, caught in a compromising position, would disarmingly ask, as the parody has it, "what are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" His instinct for lying, even under oath, earned him the second presidential impeachment in American history.

Contrast Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Consider, for example, their different approaches to Yasser Arafat. The Clintons cozy relationship with the Arafats was symbolized by Mrs. Clinton's embrace of Mrs. Arafat - on stage immediately after a speech by Mrs. Arafat condemning Israel. President Clinton's relationship, though less picturesque, was no less close. Arafat was the world leader Clinton met with most often. Clinton was certain he could talk Arafat into making peace in the Middle East - and secure Clinton 's legacy. Clinton invited Arafat and Israel 's Prime Minister Ehud Barak to the now infamous Camp David summit meeting of 2000. He pressured Barak to offer heroic compromises, only to have Arafat at the last minute turn to Intifada to try to get more. In the end, Clinton 's charm wasn't enough.

President Bush, in sharp distinction, saw Arafat as a terrorist and refused to meet with him unless he renounced the destruction of Israel as a goal and terror against civilians as a means. Bush, not Clinton, assured Israel of our full support against terrorism - and meant it.

Clinton realizes that history's judgments often are shaped as much by what is written in the aftermath of an event as they are by the facts of the event. The Kennedy family relentlessly spun the myth of Camelot to turn a failed presidency into the fantasy of an American Renaissance. Having long modeled himself after JFK (minus the fashionable, universally admired, classy wife), Clinton now seeks to redefine his presidency - and pave the way for his ultimate revenge: Hillary in office for "Clinton, Act Three." Presidents often find it hard to leave the stage.

The day of Bush's first inauguration, Clinton lingered for hours at Andrews Air Force base trying to hang on to the attention he had so enjoyed as President. He still seeks the limelight. But desperation to be noticed after leaving office, to have the respect and affection Clinton craves, isn't a substitute for doing the right thing when in office - any more than lies are a substitute for honesty, or indecision a suitable alternative to moral courage.

On the golf course, Bill Clinton is known for his dislike of playing his ball where it lies, scoring honestly, and taking his lumps as the rest of us duffers must. He makes his own score, always a good deal better than the real number.

Someone else should be trusted to do the scoring when it comes to Clinton's time in office. In the history books, he deserves to be counted as the president who did not protect us against al-Qaeda, who left the impression they could attack us without penalty, whose wasted opportunities contributed to the travesty of 9/11. Tough talk now should not be allowed to obscure that fact. Lies now should not go unanswered.

Ronald A. Cass is Chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law, Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, and author of ?The Rule of Law in America? (Johns Hopkins University Press).

[Seascamp]

So now, the street theater and matinee melodrama has WJC as some kind of ham-fisted, bad-ass Maurice, from Hell?s gate St., Steel Castle City, relentlessly going after Ben Laden, wow, impressive to say the least.
Up until this time, he made no secret of being a conflict aversive squishie boy relentlessly off on short arms drills n? writhing n? grappling with the hapless hired help or whoever was at hand; all except Hil, that is. And now no doubt a true-life, phone booth/Clark Kent saga is emerging; goodness, is that exciting or what. :ek:

Or maybe Hil smacked WJC atop the head with a fry pan a few more times and toughened him up. Smackoooooo, rings the fry pan, ?take that Mr. Pud.? :re:

Let?s see, maybe the next thing on the plate will be a poster of WJC wearing an Iron Mike, with Springfield n? bayonet and going ?over the top? and the caption reading ?And we wont be back till its over, over there.? I just got to have me one of those, for sure.

Scamp

[SuperScout]

The story going around is how Bubba has energized da dims with his 'tough talk.' So let's break it down: if you lie, if you create history where none existed before, or is you mangle history so that it makes you look better, that's OK, and that's the new Democrat playbook? So much for imagination, so much for original thinking, and so much for honesty. All three are missing elements in da dims mindset.