I told you that this Time magazine story - or more accurately, the transcript of the latest Clinton-Gore legacy revisionist strategy printed in the guise of a news story - would be the focus of every news outlet for the next few days. I was right. I've linked to my refutations of Monday at the bottom of this page, and also given you what I've added, because some things have come out since then. Condi Rice, for example, is denying receiving this imaginary report from the Clintons.The transition period is the focus of the article. But didn't Clinton refuse to help Bush during that transition? He did. Didn't Cheney have to set up his own offices because Clinton wouldn't give him the budget? Yup. So you tell me how in hell it can be that the Clinton administration passed all this on when they wouldn't even participate in the transition? To further illustrate my point, we rolled audio of the man who took the dictation for this piece (he's listed as the "author," but clearly this was just taking dictation), Massimo Calabresi in Stop The Tape! Dictation Taker.
Why doesn't Time go back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center? Clinton didn't even bother to visit the site! Why don't they go back to all the columns Dick Morris has written about how little Clinton cared about terrorism, having only two meetings in eight years with his CIA chief? Why doesn't Time go back and look at what Osama bin Laden said he learned from the Somali nation-building episode initiated by Clinton. After all, the disgraced president has raised the specter of Black Hawk Down.
There's a great editorial in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about that dreadfully botched act in Mogadishu. Eighteen Rangers and special forces soldiers were killed and something like 73 wounded. They wanted to stay and finish the job, and Clinton cut tail and dodged the war. Whatever Clinton did or didn't do about Al-Qaeda, you might be able to make a case that he sent a signal that we were weak. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that it was Islamic terrorists who did this. They're the ones responsible, not the previous administration for any signals they sent.
John Podhoretz asks a few good questions in Tuesday's New York Post that prove how uninterested the Clinton administration was by their own admission. They say all of this was on PowerPoint slide #14 - well why isn't it on #1? Good question. And why did some low-level plebe meet with Dr. Rice, instead of someone at the very top? And let's not forget: Bill Clinton rejected three separate offers by the Sudanese government to turn over Osama bin Laden. He didn't do anything in response to the USS Cole, the Saudi barracks or our two African embassies.
When he finally acted, it was against an innocent aspirin factory - and it was only done to distract from Monica Lewinsky. We covered an entire Boston Globe piece titled, "Clinton Aides Regret Letting bin Laden Off," from September 20th, 2001 that quotes Clinton as saying he would kick the terrorists hard - and then talks about how miserably he failed to live up to his rhetoric. The bottom line on this Time story is still obvious: as the Democrats are struggling for an issue to invent, do you think they'd have sat on a genuine issue if it were true? It just doesn't have one trace of credibility to it - zilch, zero, nada.