Did righties say Clinton was "too obsessed with finding bin Laden"?

[Onlooker]

When Chris Wallace interviewed him, Clinton said, "I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn't do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn't have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn't do enough said that I did too much. Same people."

Does anyone know about this? What were right-wingers saying? The only thing I remember in general is that during Bush's first six months there was criticism of him for not being involved in the Middle East. I wonder if during that period people like Limbaugh and O'Reilly were defending Bush by suggesting Clinton was too obsessed with Middle East issues. Anyone have any links? Any info? Thanks.

[Zavulon]

1. I never heard such a claim from anyone except Clinton.

Repugs usually bitch that Clinton didn't meet with his CIA chief often enough for their liking and that he "decimated" the military. To hear them talk, he didn't even know who bin Laden was.

[KelleyKramer]

9. Here are some direct quotes .....

Since you seem to have forgotten, here are several reminders, they are each sourced with links here--

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/reminder-of-gop-attacks-on-clintons.html

------

Sen. Dan Coats
Coats, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, "While there is clearly much more we need to learn about this attack and why it was ordered today, given the president's personal difficulties this week, it is legitimate to question the timing of this action."


GOP Activist Paul Weyrich
Paul Weyrich, a leading conservative activist, said Clinton's decision to bomb on the eve of the impeachment vote "is more of an impeachable offense than anything he is being charged with in Congress."

Wall St. Journal Editorial Board
"It is dangerous for an American president to launch a military strike, however justified, at a time when many will conclude he acted only out of narrow self-interest to forestall or postpone his own impeachment"

Sen. Trent Lott, GOP Majority Leader
"I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time," Lott said in a statement. "Both the timing and the policy are subject to question."

Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-NY)
"Never underestimate a desperate president," said a furious House Rules Committee Chairman Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.). "What option is left for getting impeachment off the front page and maybe even postponed? And how else to explain the sudden appearance of a backbone that has been invisible up to now?"

Rep. Tillie Folwer (R-Fla)
"It is certainly rather suspicious timing," said Rep. Tillie Fowler (R-Florida). "I think the president is shameless in what he would do to stay in office."

Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum
First, it is a "wag the dog" public relations ploy to involve us in a war in order to divert attention from his personal scandals (only a few of which were addressed in the Senate trial). He is again following the scenario of the "life is truer than fiction" movie Wag the Dog. The very day after his acquittal, Clinton moved quickly to "move on" from the subject of impeachment by announcing threats to bomb and to send U.S. ground troops into the civil war in Kosovo between Serbian authorities and ethnic Albanians fighting for independence. He scheduled Americans to be part of a NATO force under non-American command.

Jim Hoagland, Washington Post
"President Clinton has indelibly associated a justified military response ... with his own wrongdoing. ... Clinton has now injected the impeachment process against him into foreign policy, and vice versa"

Byron York, National Review
Instead of striking a strong blow against terrorism, the action set off a howling debate about Clinton's motives. The president ordered the action three days after appearing before the grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair, and Clinton's critics accused him of using military action to change the subject from the sex-and-perjury scandal — the so-called "wag the dog" strategy.

Wall St. Journal editorial
"Perceptions that the American president is less interested in the global consequences than in taking any action that will enable him to hold onto power a further demonstration that he has dangerously compromised himself in conducting the nation's affairs, and should be impeached"

[Zavulon]

14. Thanks for this.

I didn't forget, BTW. A lot of this is new to me, I'm relatively new to the political scene. Back when these quotes were being thrown back and forth, I was blissfully ignorant regarding government and convinced there was no difference between the parties. Then we got the worst president in our country's history for a second term, and suddenly I got interested. Disgusted, but interested. Long story short: I eventually found this place.

Thanks again. :)

Zavulon

[annabanana]

20. We're glad you're here.

Politics is the job we have to do for America. It comes with the freedom.

[BrotherBuzz]

22. Good collection of quotes...BUT....

They would be a lot stronger if the dates were included with the quotes. THAT's the point that needs to be driven home.

Nevertheless, it's a good collection and a good starting point.

[seabeyond]

15. that is what they say today. not what they said yesterday n/t

[Zavulon]

16. I've heard them saying it practically non-stop since 9/11. (NT)

[seabeyond]

18. they had to get the blame off bush. they are wrong

and fact and quotes and clarke prove them wrong. still they pretend they dont exist, they ignore

[Zavulon]

27. I have no doubt that they're wrong, but until today

I had never seen anyone other than Clinton himself even try to claim "obsession," much less back it up. My default setting is to assume Repugs are wrong, but it isn't unheard of for a former president to paint his administration in a favorable or convenient light. At any rate, I'm glad for all of the sources I see in this thread; this will come in handy.

[seabeyond]

28. well, i knew what clinton had done. i watched 911 commission

report way back then, listened to clarke and did my own timeline of what clinton had done with obl. after 911 i did a lot of research and people were tlaking about it and of course the republicans were already saying this shit. so i was well aware. many on this board were. we have talked about it not often, but it is talked about here.

911 commission it really came out in blame. the big difference, towards hte end of clintons presidency he was very much concerned. would have weekly meetings with the heads tenet, clarke, oneil from fbi..... and clinton would sit in on those. to bring agencies and info together. he did work hard and implement good policy with terrorists and that is the frustrating part of republicans

kinda like bush is a war hero (awol) and kerry is a traitor (war hero).

[Zavulon]

29. I really wish I had

developed an interest in politics a lot earlier than I did. This information is something I could have really used years ago, and not just because my then-girlfriend's parents made Mann Coulter look moderate.

[seabeyond]

30. oosh, that is scary. a funny. had my two boys and niece in barnes

and nobles. we were looking at wwII booksand behind us were the republican bullshit books. coulter was there. i forget the title of her books way back then but it caught my nieces attention and she read the title. i said, she is the worst of the lying right.

a good ole texan woman comes around the corner and says, she is about as honest as they get. my mouth dropped open. really,.... first time (and last) my mouth hung and i could get no words out. i had never met a person that actually believe coulters filth. i have sense. but wow..... that one floored me

[Zavulon]

31. I know at least ten people that have bought into her BS hook, line and

sinker. One of them recently told me that Coulter went easy on the 9/11 widows. That left me in the same situation you were in: "my mouth dropped open. really,.... first time (and last) my mouth hung and i could get no words out." What do you say to someone who thinks that?

[seabeyond]

32. you're funny n/t

[seabeyond]

19. you understand when i used "yesterday" i did nt mean that literally

[Zavulon]

26. Wasn't sure because it's been five years and change so far. (NT)

[magellan]

2. This thread ought to help you

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2210261

[ColonelTom]

3. Glenn Greenwald provides a nice sampling....

here.

[Marnieworld]

4. They did say this.

Thorughout the 90s. After Bill mentioned Terror in speeches, when they rejected his proposals to protect us, when he attempted to bomb Bin Laden it was "Wag the Dog" and most importantly they said this after he left when they were rejecting all of the recommendations. It was anything but Clinton. Even if he was right.

I don't have any links but this is a fair statement of Clinton's in my opinion from what I recall.

[Sparkly]

5. YES!!!

Yes, and "inventing terrorist bogeymen" to coverup for his BIG issue: the Lewinsky affair.

He was accused of "Wagging the Dog" in the Middle East.

After BushCo took office, the recycled cabinet went straight back to Reagan/Bush era "star wars" thinking (read: Iraq and rewarding defense contractors, not to mention Halliburton). ALL the rhetoric was about "ICBMs from rogue nations."

The defense budget was re-oriented away from counter-terrorism and back toward this old fear that somebody could nuke us any day. (And Tom Daschle gave a good speech about it in August 2001.)

And yes, BushCo said throughout their campaign that efforts for Israeli/Palestinian peace amounts to interfering on our own "timeline," and we just had to wait until they were ready; they said they're against "nation-building," because the military is solely to "fight and win war;" they said the military was over-extended and lamented the troops remaining in the Balkans (not a huge number!)!

[tiptoe]

6. Here's a 1996 article:

President wants Senate to hurry with new anti-terrorism laws July 30, 1996, Web posted at: 8:40 p.m. EDT

(Above link cited in Richard Clarke Debunks ABC 9-11 Docudrama —Posted by Vyan in General Discussion: Politics, Tue Sep 05th 2006, 12:05 PM)

[helderheid]

7. this should help

http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/30/clinton.terrorism/

[AnneD]

8. Yes

they did. How short and convient are these folks memories....

[LynnTheDem]

10. Yes they sure did.. "WAG THE DOG!!!" "No war for Monica!"

They most certainly did whine and bitch and complain about Clinton being "obsessed" with capturing/killing OBL.

[helderheid]

12. Now they claim he was preoccupied with Monica but THEY were the ones

preoccupied with Monica, not Bill!

[Spazito]

Here is some info...

"As it was, when Clinton sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan in 1998, he was accused by members of Congress and the media of a wag-the-dog strategy of attempting to divert attention from the scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/29/clarke.truth.tm/

[samsingh]

11. yes they blamed Clinton for going after bin laden and being obsessed

[jobycom]

Yep. Everything Bush did to fight terrorism AFTER 9-11 was proposed

by CLinton and Gore BEFORE 9-11 and rejected on straight party lines by the Republicans. The Gore Commission to strengthen and federalize airport security was considered too expensive and unnecessary (One Republican said "There has never been a foreign hijacking on American soil and there never will be"), Clinton's bill to sieze assets of foreign banks who dealt with terrorists was blocked by Phil Gramm, Clinton's attempts to hit Bin Laden with Tomahawk missiles was blasted by Republican leaders as "wagging the dog." On and on and on. Clinton even proposed a anti-terrorism cabinet level position similar to Homeland Security--again rejected by Republicans.

If the Republicans had been interested in doing their jobs during the 90s rather than impeaching a popular president for any personal matter they could find, 9-11 would not have happened. No doubt, no question. The 19 terrorists had trained for five years for those attacks, and had originally planned to carry them out during Clinton's administration, but they couldn't. They had no trouble under Bush.

Even Bush agrees. There is no stronger admission that the Republicans should have adopted Clinton's proposals before 9-11 than Bush's fighting to adopt them AFTER 9-11. If they were useless, Bush wouldn't have adopted them. If they were effective after 9-11, they would have been effective before.

Here's a Salon article from 98:
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/08/27news.html
Is bin Laden a terrorist mastermind --
or a fall guy?

Clinton and his security staff have now blamed bin Laden for being behind almost every terrorist act in the past decade -- from plotting the assassinations of the pope and the president of Egypt to the planned bombing of six U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific, with massacres of German tourists at Luxor and the killings of U.S. troops in Somalia, fatal car bombings of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and this month's truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam thrown in. Not since the '70s heyday of the terrorist Carlos has there been such a Prince of Darkness, if the allegations are to be believed.

But so far, for all of the accusations, no government, not even that of the United States, has established enough credible evidence against bin Laden to conclusively prove his direct participation in, much less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he stands accused of. To date no formal request for his extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese government that once housed him or to his current hosts, Afghanistan's Taliban leaders.

[Sparkly]

13. Btw, they also thought Gore was obsessed with counter-terrorism....

The 1996 White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, aka The Gore Commission (released in 1997), was laughed out of committee as too expensive. The classic rightwing argument boiled it down to cost per life... From Cato:

Given the paucity of information on benefits, we can develop a scenario based on the assumption that the threat from airline terrorism is completely eliminated. Since 1982, 548 people died in U.S. carrier incidents of sabotage, including TWA flight 800, or about thirty-seven people a year. Dividing this number into the cost estimates for current heightened security measures yields an annual cost per life saved of over $200 million. Excluding the TWA crash, this number would jump to a cost per life saved of well over $300 million. To put this number into perspective, a review of studies suggests that the implicit value of life for air travelers falls between $5 and $15 million. The FAA uses a value of $2.3 million per statistical life saved in evaluating its policies.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg19n4e.html

[seabeyond]

17. berger and albright told htem their greatest concern would be obl

rice and others said they didnt think so and dismissed the information those two were trying to provide for them, on the hand off of the office. also with cole, though clinton gave them the information they dismissed it, bush saying it was like swatting flies with a flyswatter

[bluestateguy]

21. reply

Anything that he said or did in 1998-early 1999 having anything to do with foreign policy was blasted as just an attempt to take the focus off of the "real" issues in the country--Monica Lewinsky, the blue dress and did he lie about it. How dare he try to do his job!

[BlueStateGirl]

23. I think Orrin Hatch might have said something along those lines

when Pennsylvania Avenue was shut down in front of the Whitehouse.

[underpants]

25. Hatch's "phoney threats" comment was about chemical markers

on explosives. I don't know if he ran his hole about closing off Penn Ave but I do know that he accused Clinton of scaring everyone for political gain on a technical matter like marking explosives so they can be tracked.

notice you didn't see Hatch for almost a year after 9/11 ANYWHERE on TV.

[TahitiNut]

24. When all else fails, why not consult the (Congressional) Record?

Here's what Bob Schaffer (R-Colorado) had to say on October 10, 1998 ...

Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, he is `wagging the dog .' To those who think the White House scandal is a private matter having no effect on the country, just ask America's farmers and ranchers.

On the eve of the impeachment vote, President Clinton vetoed the agriculture appropriations bill. Without warning, without compassion, and without logic, the President pulled the rug out from underneath America's farmers and ranches.

In the movie `Wag the Dog ,' a fictional President created a make-believe war in another country. But today, the real President has declared real war on real farmers and real ranchers, real Americans with real families.

Mr. Speaker, this President's escapade to move the crisis he created from the White House to the farmhouse is an outrage. Do not attack America's farmers, Mr. President. Do not insult the ranchers. Do not destroy the farm economy. Do not do it, Mr. President. Do not wag the dog .

Here's what Mark E. Souder (R-Indiana) said on October 11, 1998 ...

In 1995, actually right after the 1994 elections, we had a historic point in American history. For 40 years we had had a Democratic Congress, and all of a sudden we had a conservative Republican Congress and a liberal Democratic President, and we had those passions on both sides tested, and we went through this before. This is now our fourth time. There is no reason that we cannot come to an agreement unless there is another political reason, unless there is a wag -the -dog problem going on right now where the President is trying to distract attention.

Here's what Jim Gibbons (R-Nevada) said on October 12, 1998 ...

Mr. Speaker, last Friday the President decided that wag the dog was not good enough. Congress passed a bipartisan agriculture appropriation bill that included billions of dollars in emergency assistance to hard-hit farmers, and the President vetoed it. He played wag the farmer, in a suspicious attempt to divert attention from the national debate over whether or not felonies by the chief magistrate of the United States would rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Now the President is poised to go to yet another fund-raiser, this one in New York, while the important business of government is left unattended and a government shutdown is upon us.

Mr. President, we in Congress urge that you do not shut the government down. Do not wag the farmer and do not go to New York to raise money from the very people you bash whenever Republicans propose tax cuts. The President should clear his fund-raising calendar and stay in Washington and work with Congress to finish the job we were elected to do.

Mr. Speaker, I suggest the President not shut the government down.

Here's what Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said on October 6, 1998 ...

Now the President is back in town for one of his rare weeks in Washington. What did he do on his first day at work yesterday? He sought, once again, to divert attention from his own problems--this time, by threatening to shut down the Government. It is hard to tell if this President has come back to town to simply repack his bags or to take, or attempt to take, Congress hostage.

President Clinton appears intent on making the sequel to the movie `Wag the Dog .' The President hasn't participated in the process of government at all this year, and now he returns, seemingly, to attempt to shut the process down. I have to say I think this is a bit of diversion. I don't believe it is leadership.

Here's what Senator Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) said on September 23, 1998 ...

I am saddened to say the other day a reporter just outside this Chamber asked me if we were doing nothing as a country in the face of this holocaust because of the President's internal difficulties, because of his unwillingness to wag the dog , if you will. I cannot think of anything more indicative of why we need to make sure our Commander in Chief can respond, to have a Commander in Chief that can respond with the integrity of his office. And here we sit paralyzed in the face of unfolding, unspeakable tragedy.

I am here to say one thing to Mr. Milosevic: Our patience in the U.S. Senate is running out. I join the Senator from Arizona, and many others, in saying time has run out and that I will support vigorous and, if necessary, unilateral use of force against Serbian installations in Kosovo and in Serbia proper. It is time for American leadership in Kosovo. It is unfortunate that we have thus far not seen evidence of this from the Clinton administration.

Here's mmore of what Mark E. Souder (R-Indiana) said on October 11, 1998 ...

Well, one of the things that has been much talked about in this country is a movie called `Wag the Dog .' The dog , the tail wagging the dog , because of an allegation in that movie that because of a personal affair of the President he decided to start through a movie thing a war. Now, in this case clearly there is no war. I am not making any allegations that the movie in fact says anything about this President regarding that type of incident. But there is a legitimate question, is there a secondary motivation? Is there in fact a tail that wags a dog in this case where the tail says, in effect, I need a second show, I need to be able to say to the general public that there is another crisis that may take precedence over this crisis. And that in this case I think that there has been a pattern.

I want to go through, rather than talk about this President, I want to talk about a different President. I want to talk about Richard Nixon. There is a new book called Abuse of Power. Stanley Cutler has gone through the tapes which he fought through courts to try to have made public.

That's the result of a mere 15 minutes perusing the Congressional Record from September and October of 1998. Imagine what a more thorough search can resurrect from those reprehenisble days. I remember them well. It seems even my aging memory is far better than the corruptly partisan amnesia we see in our corporate media.