If Bill Clinton is not a "politician," who the hell is? The man is still running a good chunk of the Democratic Party, although he and Hillary are fighting with a far left contingent.
Jerry Ford has not been a politician. Ronald Reagan was not a politician, even before he got Alzheimers. George H. W. Bush is not a politician.
Republicans go to play golf and live on ranches when they leave power. Democrats cling to the halls of power like frigging lampreys.
Like I said, making this stink was the biggest mistake the Democrats have made in a while. A lot of records are being dug up on the Internet, a lot of reports making the rounds again, and a lot of people who haven't been interviewed in a while are showing up.
The upshot of the controversy was that Bill Clinton had made the policy decision that bin Laden would be taken alive, that he would be taken without any casualties, and that he would be taken with a legitimate civilian legal case against him. He was not willing to kill civilians to get at bin Laden, or risk lousing up either his popularity, or more legitimately, the delicate negotiations in the Middle East at the time.
Clinton missed, according a CIA man, eight to ten opportunities to take bin Laden out. Some of these have been documented in the Commission Report.
An objective person, a reasonable person, might come to Clinton's defense. He might say that before 9/11, a reasonable president might make these decisions exactly this way. That bin Laden was not so overwhelming a threat at that time that he was worth risking war and innocent civilians over. That at that time, it wasn't that unreasonable to treat these things as criminal situations and not war situations.
And of course, the same could be said of any president prior to 9/11.
As James Lileks said:
Just so you know: 9/11 reset the clock for me. All hands went to midnight. I’m interested in what people did after that date, and if the movie shows that before the attack one side lacked feck and the other was feck-deficient, I don't worry about it. It's like revisiting Congressional debates about Hawaiian harbor security in November 1941. Y'all get a pass. The Etch-A-Sketch's turned over. Now: what have you said lately?
But you see, sometimes I'm not dealing with objective, or reasonable people. The myth these other people are trying to sell me goes something like this:
George W. Bush dropped the ball on bin Laden. He didn't do the work. He didn't take bin Laden out. He didn't bomb Zarqawi in Iraq. He missed the attack plans, missed the airplane training, and 9/11 happened because of it. Our boy Clinton? He was on top of things. On the ball. Terrorism was his top priority, and bin Laden was on his mind every minute of every day. If Gore had won in 2000, he would have caught the terrorists before the attack. Or if not, he would have done Afghanistan RIGHT, sending in hundreds of thousands of troops to take out bin Laden and destroy all of al Qaeda forever.
When some blithering asshats try to sell me this massive load of dung, I'm going to drop a house on them. That's pretty much all there is to it.
Doesn't matter what happens with that TV special now. It's all out there. Hundreds of the DVDs have already been distributed. Comparisons will be made, and missing or altered scenes will be all over the web. The student study guides that were pulled back are already on the web in convenient PDF format.
Clinton's furious attack has only focused a lot of attention someplace he probably wishes it hadn't been.