On the one-week anniversary [sic] of Bill Clinton's meltdown on Fox News Sunday, I'm just itching to share a few thoughts and observations. It's the first of October. We've got a little more than a month until the mid-term elections will be (blessedly) behind us. So of course all sorts of things are not so much creeping as being extracted from the woodwork for our perusal and judgment. (Any left wing pundit or politician, by the way, who participated in making "swift boat" a verb ought to be taken out and severely lashed, but that's a different discussion.)
How and why we got to the point where our ex-pres felt the need to sit down with Chris Wallace and try to vindicate his WOT performance record is truly beyond me. I know the momentum ratcheted up with the release of the ABC fictionalized docudrama [sic] "The Path to 9/11." I know that the reactions to that piece of piffle on both sides of the debate were pretty pathetic. But now comes Bill, full of spit and venom, fire and fury, and makes an ass of himself on what's generally perceived to be a hostile news network, to the general applause and admiration of the Democratic Party, which apparently believes the meltdown represents a positive note in their Congressional campaign. Will Americans who were not already deeply entrenched in their camp see it that way? I guess we'll find out.
Even more perplexing, Chris Wallace felt it necessary to devote part of this week's program to defending his own behavior last week. Why? His questions were mild and meek and an open invitation to Clinton to defend himself against any and all accusations, yet Clinton chose to characterize them as an attack. And anyone who's been watching Wallace for a while knows that his "little smirk" is a permanent facial feature. It's been there at least since he was a guest host on "Nightline," and it persists regardless of who he's interviewing.
The most troubling thing to me about this whole brouhaha, though, is its exemplification of what I've come to think of as America's Self-Deleting Memory Syndrome. It's one thing to get confused about events that took place in the deep dark past -- say, more than twenty or thirty years ago. But most Americans of voting age ought to have a pretty clear memory of what the world was like before 9-11-01. Practically no one, no one, thought the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil was a serious issue, even after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. People who raised it were laughed out of town. After the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, after the U.S.S. Cole attack in 2000, Americans were still in deep denial. After the embassy attacks, the public outrage wasn't over Clinton's failure to take decisive action -- it was over his retaliatory bombing of a pharmaceutical company (and suspected chemical weapons plant, later cutely dubbed an "aspirin factory" by opponents of the action) in Khartoum.
Let's give our memories a little jog as to what we were thinking, as a country, before the day that pretty much changed everything. Here's a news page of the The Witherspoon Society, an arm of the PC-USA, for September, 2001. In the year and half prior to 9-11, the word "terrorist" appears on this page only twice, both times in connection with attacks on abortion clinics. Then the pace picks up rather sharply. Steven Emerson, now widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on terrorism, was either explicitly or implicitly banned from appearing on National Public Radio during the three years prior to 9-11 (his last appearance, by NPR's own admission, was in August, 1998, just after the embassy bombings). In the academic world and pervasively on the news, this was what we were hearing: that people like Emerson were "spreading an irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios."
So whose house to pox? Is there any question that neither William Jefferson Clinton nor George W. Bush did all or even a good bit of what could have been done to prevent 9-11? No. They didn't. But what seems to be getting lost in all the fuss over this is that the American people weren't prepared, willing or motivated to support what needed to be done. Apparently, a lot of us still aren't.
So while we're busy flinging blame around with the benefit of ghastly 20/20 hindsight, we should keep in mind that our leaders derive their power from us, the People. And that, unfortunately, We, the People, needed a good kick in the pants before we were ready to begin serious consideration of whether to grant them even a modicum of that power. We're still considering. Let's hope we figure it out before the next kick comes.
To all of you who are observing the holy day of Yom Kippur, an easy fast.
G'mar Hatima Tova.
