Bush's Record for his first year:January 2001:
In his memoir, "Against All Enemies", Clarke wrote that when he first briefed Rice on Al-Qaeda, in a January 2001 meeting, "her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before." He also stated that Rice made a decision that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism should be downgraded. By demoting the office, the Administration sent a signal through the national security bureaucracy about the salience they assigned to terrorism. No longer would Clarke's memos go to the President; instead they had to pass though a chain of command of National Security Advisor Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, who bounced every one of them back.
If you haven't, you should read
Against All Enemies. Clarke has, with some justification in my opinion, been criticized as being self-aggrandizing in this book, but that's beside the point. He paints a portrait of an administration obsessed with Iraq and the previous administration. If Clinton felt Al-Qaeda was a threat, then obviously it wasn't.
06 August 2001: George Bush is on vacation in Texas, and is given a briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush is reported to have heard the briefer out, then responded, "
All right. You've covered your ass, now."
03-04 September: George Bush ends his vacation and returns to Washington.
11 September 2001: 'Nuff said? Maybe not... here's
Mary Matalin on CNN Sunday. Yes, three days ago:
"I was there [in the Bush White House]. We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history. And President Bush dealt with it."
And here's
Dana Perino a month ago:
Dana Perino's status as an almost member of Team Obama isn't keeping her from bashing the White House. Last night she told Fox News' Sean Hannity that she thought the President was playing politics by refusing to describe the massacre at Fort Hood as a terrorist attack. Perino then decided to get extra Fox News-y by mangling some facts when she said, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
Yeah. Right. Never Forget.
Also too, by the way,
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began.
18 September 2001:
80's Thrash Metal rears
its ugly head.
The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. (A 2004 study however, has shown that the total number of harmed people should be raised to 68)
12 November 2001: AA Flight 587 crashes in Queens, New York. After being told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over by NTSB representatives that there was no evidence of terrorist involvement, but that an investigation was underway, all the little newshounds dutifully report that this was probably another terrorist attack.
Lockwood quits watching TV news.
And the
final outcome:
Nonetheless, terrorism was officially ruled out as the cause by the National Transportation Safety Board, which instead attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls.
22 December 2001:
Richard Reid (AKA Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja) is overpowered by flight attendants and other passengers after attempting to detonate
PETN explosives hidden in his shoes. He was screened on French soil and was traveling from Charles De Gaulle International Airport (Paris) to Miami International Airport.
Obama's record for his first year:05 November, 2009:
An Islamic Army psychiatrist kills 13 and wounds 30 others, at Fort Hood Texas. Hopefully, it will become clearer during the trial as to the degree of fanatic involvement in this act. It has been reported that
Hasan attended the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, in 2001, at the same time as Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, two of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks. A law enforcement official said that the FBI will probably look into whether Hasan associated with the hijackers. A review of Hasan's computer and his multiple e-mail accounts has revealed visits to websites espousing radical Islamist ideas, a senior law enforcement official said.
However,
Hasan is an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, who had on a number of occasions expressed radical beliefs, and had communicated by e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, but FBI terrorism task forces had determined him not to be a threat prior to the shooting.
As far as I'm concerned, the jury hasn't even been in yet, so it can't be out. This may be a terrorist action, or it may be the action of a single deranged man pushed over the edge. I don't know, but I'm willing to be convinced either way as the trial unfolds.
(In an attempt to be fair, I've looked over a number of articles to try to determine whether Obama received any briefings prior to Christmas regarding heightened terrorism concerns. I presume that major travel holidays are routinely treated as periods of heightened concern and that Obama is routinely filled in regarding those concerns and related procedures. But I find no clear indication that he was given any warning or indication of a particular risk.)
25 December 2009:
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is overpowered by flight attendants and other passengers after attempting to detonate
PETN explosives hidden in his underpants. He was screened on Dutch soil and was traveling from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.
Clearly, the problem is that those danged dems just want to coddle the terrorists and
ignore the danger. I mean, it's obvious to anybody who watches Fox News.
"They just don't get it," Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, wrote in a fundraising letter for his gubernatorial campaign. "These are the same weak-kneed liberals who have recently tried to bring Guantanamo Bay terrorists right here to Michigan!"
Just like Bill Clinton, who personally trained all 'leventy-seven 9/11 terrists to fly jets, and the complete opposite of dubya, who kept us safe and free for every single day of his eight-year reign.
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