To the extent that “different ideas of dealing with that threat” are more or less effective, the individuals responsible for dealing with it have responsibility for the result.

The gist of Olbermann’s rant was not that Bush was responsible for 9/11, rather that Bush has been unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility for 9/11 while allowing conservative interests to place full responsibility at the feet of Bill Clinton.

Actually the question posed in the interview was “Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and Al-Quaida out of business when you were president?”

Working under the assumption that Clinton did have a true emotional response to the question (since some have claimed that his response was completely calculated) that Wallace posed I would posit that if Chris Wallace had truly asked the question as you “summed it up” then Clinton probably wouldn’t have freaked out.

The actual question he asked is very accusatory. By it’s wording it assumes Clinton didn’t do enough. “How often do you beat your wife?” as opposed to “Have you ever beat your wife?”

If the question was “Do you feel like you did enough to put Bin Laden and Al-Quaida out of business when you were president?” I think there would’ve been a completely different response.

Anyway, I wanted to make a quick observation. Olbermann counters the claim that Clinton was too caught up in the Lewinsky scandal to deal with OBL by asking

“Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?”

Which is a good question, given that the answer indicates that republican lawmakers at the time weren’t too worked up over terrorism either. But, doesn’t the “political media” deserve a fair amount of blame for this shift in focus as well? Aren’t they the ones who let the republicans set the agenda firmly on the scandal, and the ones who ultimately determined to “strangle [the public] with the trivia that was, ‘All Monica All The Time’”?

And finally, the worst presidency since Buchannan? Seriously?

I’m not going to engage in argument over the NIE and what it says. Nor am I going to defend Bush’s policy with regard to Iraq. However, Lowdoggy is right in that the NIE was not released but leaked illegally. One of the major points of Olbermann’s rant is that the supposed “hit job” by Chris Wallace was intentionally meant to draw attention away from the “release” of the NIE. As Lowdoggy said, since it wasn’t “released” but leaked to a publication that is anything but friendly to the Bush Administration, it’s hard to subscribe to Olbermann’s conspiracy theory without willfully ignoring your own sense of logic.

Regarding Chris Wallace’s “attack” of President Clinton in which Olbermann claims Wallace lost his all his journalistic credibility with one question, anyone has to but watch interview to see that Clinton overreacted. Wallace simply asked whether Clinton had done enough to prevent 9/11, a fair and topical question given both ABC’s 9/11 Movie and Clinton’s public response to it. How that amounts to an attack is beyond me. Any reasonable person watching the video can see that Clinton simply lost his composure after having been confronted with this issue far too often recently. Olbermann seems all too willing to annoint Clinton “Truth Teller” and condemn anyone who dare’s to question his administration’s anti-terror policies.

Finally, regarding Bush and 9/11, suddenly, five years later, people want to act like 8 months is this gargantuan amount of time. The fact is, anyone who knows anything about government knows that our intelligence and law enforcement communities are made up of long-entrenched bureaucracies that are made up of career bureaucrats that have no real loyalty or connection to the President. Any top-down changes in anti-terror or intelligence gathering policies would have taken a lot longer than 8 months, especially prior to 9/11 when there was lack of political will to engage in such bureaucratic wrangling. My point: Bush, as with all Presidents, inherited an anti-terror policy that had evolved over time. This policy, as has been noted by the 9/11 Commission and others, prevented effective intelligence gathering and enforcement. Given the fact that Clinton was President for 8 years directly prior to 9/11 (the years in which most aspects of the 9/11 attack were planned and coordinated) and oversaw the government’s response the Embassy Bombings and the first World Trade Center bombing, I don’t think it’s unfair to conclude that he had a greater opportunity in that time to reform the system than Bush had in first 8 months he had in office. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at Clinton’s feet with regard to 9/11. However, to say that Bush is more to blame shows a grave misunderstanding on the part of Olbermann.

Finally, I love the complaints of Olbermann and other ultra-leftists who claim that our nation’s media is pro-Bush. Sure, Fox News panders to conservatives. However, to say that the power of fox outweighs CNN, MSNBC, all three major Networks, and the majority of major newspapers is ridiculous. Not that all those entities have it in for Republicans (some of them do…CNN, CBS, The New York Times, etc.), but one would have a hard time saying that all those organizations have a demonstrable pro-Bush bias. Olbermann pretty much justifies his existence by making Fox News out to be the end all of American media and himself the fearless propaganda slayer. In short, he’s a colossal tool.

How’s that?

Can Bush Read?: The National Intelligence Estimate says what the Times said it said.

“But Bush was clearly wrong to suggest that the Times mischaracterized the NIE. The document he released says what the New York Times reported. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself, below and on the following three pages.”

Click above to read the full article.

“The Iraq conflict has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

While the NIE does have points that back up some of the Bush Administration’s objectives in the war on terrorism, I read the whole thing and do not see anything that makes Olbermann wrong on this or any other point he made.