At the rate they are going, this post may become lie of the hour or minute. Indeed, I cannot think of a time during the last year when a Republican of any standing has told the truth.
The winner today: Mary Matalin.
“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 within a year of his presidency at this comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent. And we were creating jobs.”
She said this yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union with John King. She was complaining about President Obama always mentioning the inconvenient fact that Bush saddled Obama with an economic crisis and two wars. Republicans in general (given Senator Olympia Snowe’s comment over the weekend that we cannot ever “dredge up history”) do not like their record being looked at, for it reveals their ideas to be bankrupt and their actions to be either criminal or folly.
However, in her complaining about her party’s record of failure being brought up time and again by President Obama, she brazenly lied. Technically speaking, President Bush did not inherit a recession from President Clinton. The 2001 recession began in March 2001, when President Bush had been on the job for two full months. Now, the Dot Com bubble bust was already underway when Bush took office, which was to blame for the 2001 recession, so I will let that lie slide since you can argue that President Clinton passed on a recession to Bush.
But “Bush inherited an attack?” How does one inherit a terrorist attack? 9/11 took place a full nine months into Bush’s term. President-elect Bush and his transition team and national security team ignored repeated warnings from President Clinton and Richard Clarke about the danger Bin Laden posed to the United States. Indeed, Clinton informed Bush et al about their success in preventing the planned Millenium attacks in 2000, but that he was convinced Bin Laden and Al Queda would try again. What was President-elect Bush’s response to this warning and advice? Bush said he disagreed and thought Iraq would pose a much more dangerous threat to America than Bin Laden.
If Bush had followed Clinton’s advice, and kept up the focus and pressure on Bin Laden and Al Queda, perhaps 9/11 would have never happened. But it did, and it was Bush’s fault we endured the loss of 3,000 Americans.
You fucking Republicans want to politicize national security, fine. We can do that. You want to play game, fine. Your death toll is higher than ours.