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Wednesday, Nov 26, 2003
Damning with Faint Praise
Clark used one of my favorite rhetorical devices, faint praise, in his interview on Face the Nation. Take it away Wesley ...
But I'm not running to bash George Bush. A lot of Americans really love him. They love what he represents -- a man who's overcome adversity in his life from alcoholism, and pulled his marriage back together, and moved forward.
Simplified History
Matalin and Carville went at it this weekend in Tim Russert's Playhouse. Matatlin's summary of the Terror Wars was this: "There are two ways to fight global terror. You can go after the terrorists as the president has done since 9/11. Or you can do what we did before 9/11, which is treat it as a law enforcement issue."
By my reckoning, Matalin left out a few details. Clinton treated it as a law enforcement issue, and was working up a more aggressive plan to fight al Queda. But in the hand-off to the Bush administration, the focus on al Queda was lost. The Bushies did this because a) they thought Clinton had a bizarre obsession with terror, and b) they automatically took the contrary position to any Clinton policy. After fucking ignoring al Queda, the Bush administration presided over the worst attack on American soil since 1941. After a half-hearted attempt to re-invent Afghanistan as a free and democratic nation, the Bushistas went on a tangential expedition into Iraq ('cause Saddam tried to kill Junior's Daddy), and bogged down the better part of the US military in a bloody attempt to establish a new "free and democratic" colony.
Okay, so that's not as concise as Matalin's synopsis, but the truth isn't always a tidy, little fairy tale. She came closest to the truth when she said "[Terrorism] hadn't been addressed before 9/11, and the result was 9/11." Let's all remember exactly which dumbfuck was briefed about possible al Queda hijackings on August 6, 2001, and still spent that month on vacation.
I'm with Carville on this one. His take on the Bushista Terror Wars is this: "As a result of it, we've created more terrorists. We are in the terrorist creating business."
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