The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, September 28, 2006
The Imploding Democrats: Clinton's Meltdown is only the Beginning
AJ Strata chronicles for us that all is not as rosy as the Democrat spin-masters and their willing cohorts in the media would have you believe.
Hot on the heals of the NIE which clearly states Iraq is pivatol to success in our war against terror, the fall’s regularly falling gas prices, a rising stock market reaching new highs, low unemployment and surging consumer confidence, and poll after poll showing Democrat leads disappearing (in most cases) comes more news - the idea that Democrats are exaggerating their chances at winning this fall! [H/T Drudge]
Democratic pollsters are pushing lots of polls that show second- and third-tier candidates performing surprisingly well. If most of these challengers win, the Democrats will gain 30 or 40 House seats.
Obviously, that’s unlikely. Extremely unlikely, writes Stuart Rothenberg in fresh editions of ROLL CALL.
Say it ain’t so - Democrats exaggerating?! Too funny. One would ask why are they doing this? What is the point? The point is their base is so emotional and so angry that if they get a whiff of defeat they are going to throw a fit. And that fit will be aimed squarely at the national democrat leaders in the House and Senate. The far left has been spoiling for a fight with the conservative majority and they expect their incoherent rantings to lead the way to victory. The NIE fiasco this week is a clear example of the grasping at mirages the left has now succumbed to. The Dems and media feed some half true leak about Iraq that fits the fantasy world-view of the far left, they go crazy and then reality smacks them up side head when they find out the truth is the IC says we cannot lose in Iraq and stay safe.
The Democrats are weaving tales and myths and basically lying to their foot soldiers they are on the path to glory - when in reality it is all make believe. Make believe so they won’t quit on them and lose worse than they will. It was a huge gamble the leftwing media and congressional democrats decided to try. Lying to your base is pretty gutsy. You can lie about your opponents in politics - you should never try and fool your base. If you get caught the damage is unbelievable.
This is a great read, and there is much more; read it all here.
Speaking of meltdowns, a couple of additional posts today pretty much tie up the whole Clinton temper tantrum and ties it neatly with a golden bow. The first of these was an analysis of the meltdown itself, courtesy of Ed Morrow in National Review Online (bold emphases are mine):
So, was it a political ploy crafted to raise doubts about George Bush’s terrorism policies just before midterm elections? Or, was Bill Clinton playing the Spiro Agnew role for his wife, scoring the political points that please the wilder elements in their party and that Hillary/Nixon can’t make while triangulating her way into the White House? Could it be, as Hillary and other Democrats proclaimed afterwards, that Clinton was righteously standing up to politically motivated critics unfairly blaming him for 9/11? Well, no, no, and no. As those who have worked with Clinton have written, he often throws nasty tantrums, especially when he is embarrassed. The rant he launched into when Chris Wallace interviewed him for Fox News Sunday wasn’t a tactic or role playing or insulted dignity; it was a narcissistic meltdown with fiery bursts of Clintonian bluster, insults, truths shaved down to fit, and fervid insistence of his own exceptionalism.
The spark to Clinton’s rant was a question Wallace said many of his viewers had e-mailed him to ask the ex-president. After the airing of the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11, it was the obvious question of the moment and Clinton should have expected it. “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?” In response, Clinton went nova, spinning a strange conspiracy theory. It’s hard to follow his logic but it appears to go like this: Wallace was giving him a hard time because Fox boss Rupert Murdoch was about to support Clinton’s global-warming campaign and Fox’s viewers would be annoyed. To placate these fanatical right-wingers, who, we must suppose, are all pro-global warming, an ambush of Clinton was plotted by Wallace and Fox big wigs. This plotting presumably excluded Murdoch, the biggest wig at Fox, because he could have avoided offending Fox viewers by not supporting Clinton’s cause in the first place. As with a lot of paranoid reasoning, the gaps in logic don’t have to be closed for the paranoid thinker to reach his conclusion. In this case, that conclusion was that Wallace was part of a “serious disinformation campaign” meant to blame Clinton for 9/11.
Clinton could have simply said I did X, Y, and Z to get bin Laden and al Qaeda, then the questioning would have moved on to other matters, but the former president is accustomed to the most gentle media treatment. As Wallace noted in the Washington Post after the incident, he was surprised that no other television interviewer had already asked Clinton the question during Clinton’s recent round of interviews conducted as part of his publicity campaign for the Clinton Global Initiative. No one at CNN, CBS, MSNBC, or anywhere else asked him anything so rude. They were more apt to ask, “Do you get angry when your critics unfairly attack you?” Or “Why do you think your critics want to destroy America and kill all the puppies and kittens?”
Instead of a calm, presidential answer, Clinton lashed out at Wallace. Among other things, he said, “You’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever.” This criticism was undercut by Clinton’s own smirking and I’m-so-smart insinuation that he had Wallace’s plan all figured out. “So you did Fox’s bidding on this show,” he said. “You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.” He leaned into Wallace’s face and wagged the same finger he wagged back when — well, you remember when. He then employed it to angrily poke the notes Wallace had on his knee. He even contemptuously accused Wallace of intending “to move your bones.” I suspect he meant to employ the gangland euphemism, “making your bones,” for a mobster committing a murder in order to be initiated into the mafia. The Sopranos may be a hit show but being compared to a hitman is still pretty insulting.
Clinton asserted, “There is not a living soul in the world who … was paying any attention to it or even knew terrorists associated with al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of ’93.” Clinton seems to have forgotten that al Qaeda was identified as the group behind the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that killed six while injuring over a thousand. Later, Clinton’s national-security adviser Anthony Lake was quoted as saying that it was after this attack that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden. He said he then briefed Clinton about bin Laden. Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla), chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare wrote several letters to Clinton, beginning in 1993, warning him about bin Laden. Apparently, both these gentlemen are zombies, bereft of living souls.
Touche! But it would not be fitting to put the Clinton tantrum to bed without some real historical background. Brandon Miniter gives us all the history we could possibly want in today's Opinion Journal:
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.
By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.
• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.
• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.
• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case. Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.
• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.
• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.
When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
Hot on the heals of the NIE which clearly states Iraq is pivatol to success in our war against terror, the fall’s regularly falling gas prices, a rising stock market reaching new highs, low unemployment and surging consumer confidence, and poll after poll showing Democrat leads disappearing (in most cases) comes more news - the idea that Democrats are exaggerating their chances at winning this fall! [H/T Drudge]
Democratic pollsters are pushing lots of polls that show second- and third-tier candidates performing surprisingly well. If most of these challengers win, the Democrats will gain 30 or 40 House seats.
Obviously, that’s unlikely. Extremely unlikely, writes Stuart Rothenberg in fresh editions of ROLL CALL.
Say it ain’t so - Democrats exaggerating?! Too funny. One would ask why are they doing this? What is the point? The point is their base is so emotional and so angry that if they get a whiff of defeat they are going to throw a fit. And that fit will be aimed squarely at the national democrat leaders in the House and Senate. The far left has been spoiling for a fight with the conservative majority and they expect their incoherent rantings to lead the way to victory. The NIE fiasco this week is a clear example of the grasping at mirages the left has now succumbed to. The Dems and media feed some half true leak about Iraq that fits the fantasy world-view of the far left, they go crazy and then reality smacks them up side head when they find out the truth is the IC says we cannot lose in Iraq and stay safe.
The Democrats are weaving tales and myths and basically lying to their foot soldiers they are on the path to glory - when in reality it is all make believe. Make believe so they won’t quit on them and lose worse than they will. It was a huge gamble the leftwing media and congressional democrats decided to try. Lying to your base is pretty gutsy. You can lie about your opponents in politics - you should never try and fool your base. If you get caught the damage is unbelievable.
This is a great read, and there is much more; read it all here.
Speaking of meltdowns, a couple of additional posts today pretty much tie up the whole Clinton temper tantrum and ties it neatly with a golden bow. The first of these was an analysis of the meltdown itself, courtesy of Ed Morrow in National Review Online (bold emphases are mine):
So, was it a political ploy crafted to raise doubts about George Bush’s terrorism policies just before midterm elections? Or, was Bill Clinton playing the Spiro Agnew role for his wife, scoring the political points that please the wilder elements in their party and that Hillary/Nixon can’t make while triangulating her way into the White House? Could it be, as Hillary and other Democrats proclaimed afterwards, that Clinton was righteously standing up to politically motivated critics unfairly blaming him for 9/11? Well, no, no, and no. As those who have worked with Clinton have written, he often throws nasty tantrums, especially when he is embarrassed. The rant he launched into when Chris Wallace interviewed him for Fox News Sunday wasn’t a tactic or role playing or insulted dignity; it was a narcissistic meltdown with fiery bursts of Clintonian bluster, insults, truths shaved down to fit, and fervid insistence of his own exceptionalism.
The spark to Clinton’s rant was a question Wallace said many of his viewers had e-mailed him to ask the ex-president. After the airing of the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11, it was the obvious question of the moment and Clinton should have expected it. “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?” In response, Clinton went nova, spinning a strange conspiracy theory. It’s hard to follow his logic but it appears to go like this: Wallace was giving him a hard time because Fox boss Rupert Murdoch was about to support Clinton’s global-warming campaign and Fox’s viewers would be annoyed. To placate these fanatical right-wingers, who, we must suppose, are all pro-global warming, an ambush of Clinton was plotted by Wallace and Fox big wigs. This plotting presumably excluded Murdoch, the biggest wig at Fox, because he could have avoided offending Fox viewers by not supporting Clinton’s cause in the first place. As with a lot of paranoid reasoning, the gaps in logic don’t have to be closed for the paranoid thinker to reach his conclusion. In this case, that conclusion was that Wallace was part of a “serious disinformation campaign” meant to blame Clinton for 9/11.
Clinton could have simply said I did X, Y, and Z to get bin Laden and al Qaeda, then the questioning would have moved on to other matters, but the former president is accustomed to the most gentle media treatment. As Wallace noted in the Washington Post after the incident, he was surprised that no other television interviewer had already asked Clinton the question during Clinton’s recent round of interviews conducted as part of his publicity campaign for the Clinton Global Initiative. No one at CNN, CBS, MSNBC, or anywhere else asked him anything so rude. They were more apt to ask, “Do you get angry when your critics unfairly attack you?” Or “Why do you think your critics want to destroy America and kill all the puppies and kittens?”
Instead of a calm, presidential answer, Clinton lashed out at Wallace. Among other things, he said, “You’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever.” This criticism was undercut by Clinton’s own smirking and I’m-so-smart insinuation that he had Wallace’s plan all figured out. “So you did Fox’s bidding on this show,” he said. “You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.” He leaned into Wallace’s face and wagged the same finger he wagged back when — well, you remember when. He then employed it to angrily poke the notes Wallace had on his knee. He even contemptuously accused Wallace of intending “to move your bones.” I suspect he meant to employ the gangland euphemism, “making your bones,” for a mobster committing a murder in order to be initiated into the mafia. The Sopranos may be a hit show but being compared to a hitman is still pretty insulting.
Clinton asserted, “There is not a living soul in the world who … was paying any attention to it or even knew terrorists associated with al Qaeda was a growing concern in October of ’93.” Clinton seems to have forgotten that al Qaeda was identified as the group behind the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center that killed six while injuring over a thousand. Later, Clinton’s national-security adviser Anthony Lake was quoted as saying that it was after this attack that he first heard the name Osama bin Laden. He said he then briefed Clinton about bin Laden. Rep. Bill McCollum (R., Fla), chairman of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare wrote several letters to Clinton, beginning in 1993, warning him about bin Laden. Apparently, both these gentlemen are zombies, bereft of living souls.
Touche! But it would not be fitting to put the Clinton tantrum to bed without some real historical background. Brandon Miniter gives us all the history we could possibly want in today's Opinion Journal:
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.
By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.
• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.
• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.
• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case. Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.
• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.
• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.
When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
