I miss Bill

[elfs]

Glenn Greenwald has a fascinating point: The first attack on the World Trade Center was the February 26, 1993 bombing, organized by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, which happened seven weeks after Bill Clinton became president.

No other attacks happened on American soil during Bill Clinton's presidency. Therefore, using Republican Reasoning™, The policies of the Clinton Administration were completely effective at keeping the US homeland safe, and it was not until George Bush took the White House that Islamic terrorists felt confident they could successfully strike on American soil.

There was no Guantanamo. There was no waterboarding. There was no Bahgram. There was the rule of law, and the trying of Sheik Rahman and his co-conspirators in civilian courts, and his imprisonment is an ordinary US prison, and yet, somehow, Bill Clinton was just as effective as George W. Bush at protecting the homeland, and there were fewer civilian deaths on his watch, and we ended his administration with a surplus!

Imagine that.

I mention this because this week we've seen the march of astonishingly an alarming amount of disasturbatory material from the Freepers, all along the lines of "God, please have more Americans die so they can learn the error of depriving God's Own Party of the power it is divinely allocated." But even worse, Mark Theissen, Bush's speechwriter, has been everywhere saying that Obama, by going back to Clinton's plan, is inviting tragedy. First, in the Washington Post:

the policies and institutions that George W. Bush put in place to stop this are succeeding. During the campaign, Obama pledged to dismantle many of these policies. He follows through on those pledges at America's peril -- and his own. If Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible. President Obama has inherited a set of tools that successfully protected the country for 2,688 days -- and he cannot dismantle those tools without risking catastrophic consequences.

And then, at National Review:

The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London's Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It's not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

And then On NPR, discussing whether or not Bush administration officials commited war crimes:

The thought that we're sitting here discussing whether these people should be prosecuted or investigated is just outrageous. These people are American heroes who saved lives and stopped the next Sept. 11.

There's not a shred of evidence to support Theissen's claims that the Bush administration's illegal activities were necessary to prevent any of these.

Theissen's fearmonger is grotesque, but there's more. Greenwald lists a lot of others who want you to be scared, because that's all they have: your fear.