Revisionist History 101

I was honestly planning not to inflict anyone with my posts today, but J.D. Mullane’s column in today’s Bucks County Courier Times is absolutely too stoo-pid to ignore.

And my word, has J.D. been busy lately, what with making jokes about tear-gassing hippies, longing once more for Cold War cartoon propaganda and calling for a reinstatement of the draft. I guess he’s bidding for a spot in the media wing of the Freeper Hall Of Fame.

His thesis of sorts today is that the baby boomers have dropped the ball on fighting the war against terrorism/Islamofascism/whatever the hell it is being called this week by Time and Newsweek, as well as the looming crisis with Social Security and Medicare.

(And by the way, I am not trying to trivialize the actual threat of terrorism by saying that; Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia captured my sentiments pretty well on that subject earlier this week in his response to Dubya’s State Of Disunion address.)

This is what Mullane has to say about Dubya’s illustrious predecessor (oh, for intelligent, adult leadership once more)…

They (posterity, presumably) will wonder: How did brainy Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, fail to understand the rising ideological struggle of his time? Even as the Islamists declared their plans and bombed Americans around the world?

Through one of the easier Google searches I’ve ever performed in my life, I came across this article in Time Magazine written by correspondent Michael Elliot about a briefing Richard Clarke, chair of Clinton’s Counterterrorism Security Group, held with Condoleezza Rice, then-National Security Adviser, over al Qaeda in January 2001 after Dubya became president (Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, claims that he attended the briefing, and I believe him). I think this excerpt is noteworthy…

“…senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble—Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen—would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime.”

…

The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11—that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By (the summer of 2001), many of those in the know—the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries—were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

I should be fair and note that Mullane also chastised Dubya in his column, not for what I mentioned above, but for Iraq War II.

Also, if Mullane wants to learn more about how the Clinton Administration responded to al Qaeda, in particular the embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, I would refer him to pages 797-799 of Clinton’s autobiography “My Life.” I don’t have a link available, but Mullane can go do his own research; he gets paid to do that, and I don’t.

And if Mullane is going to complain that we are not trying to fix Social Security, then here is my response: let’s begin by eliminating the $90,000 cap on earnings subject to social security withholding. That will do more to insure the program’s solvency than any more of Dubya’s privatization schemes. And as far as Medicare is concerned, how can we trust this president and the Republicans in congress on this issue since they were the ones who foisted the scam of Medicare Part D and the “donut hole” (here is more information on Dubya's non-solutions to the problems with Social Security and Medicare...and by the way, remember what potty mouth George Carlin says about Social Security in the video link I have in the upper right column on the home page).

Instead of idiotic generalities in which Mullane blames “the baby boomers” for not resolving the issues he cited (I have my own issues with “my generation” on matters of significantly lesser import, I should add), why doesn’t he affix blame where it belongs (including the fact that his hero Ronnie Reagan was the one who got al Qaeda going when we supported the mujahedeen in its fight against the Russians in Afghanistan)?

I’ll tell you what; let’s not waste time asking Mullane a question like that, since he won’t take it seriously. Why don’t we ask Dale Larson, publisher of the Bucks County Courier Times, instead?