I wonder if the response to this will be "Buh...buh...but CLINTON...."

One of Wingnuttia's favorite memes is that the 9/11 attacks were Bill Clinton's fault because he had the chance to have Osama Bin Laden handed to him on a silver platter and turned it down.

The story usually goes something like this.

It's funny how these same people never talk about Bush botching the chance to get Bin Laden in Tora Bora, or how he "doesn't spend much time on him" anymore, or how he shut down the unit hunting for him. I wonder what these people are going to have to say about this:

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior members of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan. You mean the same country where Bin Laden is hiding? With enemies like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Al-Qaeda hardly needs friends. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton were president and called off a raid to nab Ayman al-Zawahri because it might piss off Pakistan? Can you imagine what the Big Swinging Dicks at the wingnut think tanks and their manlove lackeys in the media (*cough* Chris Matthews *cough*) would have to say? For that matter, can you imagine if John Kerry, or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama were president and a raid to capture significant Al-Qaeda leaders were called off because radicals in Pakistan would be angry?

Let's look at the scorecard, shall we?

The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, and Bill Clinton's justice department and intelligence apparatus found the perpetrators, tried them, convicted them in U.S. courts under constitutional U.S. law and imprisoned them for life. The Republican answer to this attack was for Rudy Giuliani to put his control center in 7 WTC; for George W. Bush to dismiss CIA agents hand-delivering a briefing memo that said "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" with a testy "OK, you've covered your ass now" and then to sit in an elementary school classroom for seven minutes while people jumped to their deaths in New York City. He let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, then allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan because he had to move the war to Iraq to show Poppy whose penis is bigger. Now, because of Bush's destabilization of Iraq, Al Qaeda, which never had a toehold in Iraq before, does. And still he uses the threat of Al-Qaeda in an attempt to keep Americans frightened into submission to his insane will, as he did on July 4 in an address before the West Virginia National Guard:

Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda -- the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th. A major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.

Yes, because HE, George W. Bush, made it possible for them to be there.

This president's record on terrorism has been one spectacular failure after another, and he has not shown that he has learned anything from these failures. The question is whether Americans have.