Thursday, October 23, 2003

THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK

I wouldn't really care about this story -- it's just the yammerings of another demonizing yahoo -- but you have to realize that this yahoo's book was a New York Times bestseller:

Author Miniter Faults Gore and Jeffords for Botching 9/11

WASHINGTON – Al Gore and Sen. Jim Jeffords are largely to blame for the slow start of the Bush administration’s security team before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moreover, the president has good cause to be wary of the Clinton holdover who runs the CIA.

Richard Miniter, author of the book “Losing bin Laden,” does not make this case in those exact words, but that is the essence of his message on where the fault lies in lack of preparedness for the aircraft-turned-bombs that brought down the World Trade Center towers, rammed into the Pentagon and went down in Pennsylvania.

Gore’s refusal to concede his loss in Florida in 2000 “severely truncated the presidential transition,” the author and investigative journalist said at a meeting Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation.

“So that the Bush people didn’t even know who they were going to name in certain spots in their national security apparatus. They were mostly empty boxes on an organizational chart,” he said.

It did not help, of course that lame duck Bill Clinton refused to allow the Bush transition team access to federal facilities normally available to an incoming president until Gore’s five-week foot-dragging attempt to steal the election had been stopped.

...“And then we had some guy named Jim Jeffords who decided he wanted to be independent of the Republicans and handed the Senate to the Democrats,” Miniter noted.

What that meant in practical terms, he explained, was that “all the national security jobs that we could expect to be confirmed within a month to six weeks by a Republican Senate, would take six or eight months in a Democratic Senate, and maybe not be confirmed at all.”

...Miniter believes that is one reason George Tenet was kept on at the CIA, because “the Bush people could not get their man confirmed as CIA director on a timely basis. Remember that the [new] FBI director [Robert Mueller] was put into his job only a week before 9/11.” ...


--NewsMax

The GOP -- the party of personal responsibility.

So does that mean the attack-dog Right is suddenly going to stop blaming Janet Reno and the entire Clinton administration for the Waco incident? After all, Reno was Clinton's third choice for attorney general, after the GOP decided to score points by attacking Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood. Reno had just been sworn in when Waco came to a boil.

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