<

TODAY'S JOLT: Blow Jobs and Blown Opportunities
Wednesday, January 2, 2002
By Dan Kennedy
The Phoenix Media Communications Group

The headline of Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh’s column is "While Clinton Slept" ... Frankly, a more apt headline would have been "While the Media Snickered."

It was the afternoon of Thursday, August 20, 1998. A half-dozen of us were gathered around a TV in a private office down the hall from the newsroom. The United States had just launched missiles at two suspected Al Qaeda bases, an alleged chemical-weapons plant in Sudan and a training camp in Afghanistan. And we were laughing.

That was the same month, if you recall, that Bill Clinton was finally forced to admit what he had denied for months: that he had, indeed, had a sexual relationship with "that woman," Monica Lewinsky. Congressional Republicans and the media were in a fury, demanding his resignation or impeachment. Surely, we thought, Clinton's cruise missiles must have been aimed more at shoring up his sagging poll numbers than at punishing those who had attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania several weeks earlier.

I thought about that day this past Sunday, when the New York Times weighed in with a massive special report arguing that, for the better part of a decade, the U.S. had repeatedly ignored or paid insufficient attention to signs that we were likely -- someday, somehow -- to become the victim of a terrorist attack. From the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, to Clinton's bungled response in 1998, through George W. Bush's halting steps pre–September 11, the Times argued, the U.S. blew repeated attempts to crush Osama bin Laden.
(More: BostonPhoenix.com News Source)
2001 © Phoenix Media Communications Group.

Dan