One thing is perfectly clear about the Bill Clinton administration. He could never really handle the job of president. At least not when it came to making difficult life and death decisions about defending this country. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s new book makes that perfectly clear.
A meglomaniac like Clinton could never make the tough decisions about national security when their own popularity was their top priority. Bill Clinton was literally phsyically unable to endure the potential pitfall of true leadership. He needed to be loved, and you cannot be loved when you take on big challenges. Too many things could go wrong and hurt your poll numbers. The idea of being unpopular upset Bill Clinton more than a world without fast food and slutty interns.
It certainly took priority over defending this country, as the former FBI Director makes clear in this book. Responding assertively to repeated, increasingly deadly terrorists attacks against the US and its interests overseas would have upset many people, here in the states and among his friends in Europe.
The calculation was clear. Forcefully defend the United States, or, talk a big game, and hope that nothing else happened. Clinton chose the latter and the result is that George W. Bush inhereted a fully formed global terrorist network that was coiled and poised to strike its biggest blow.
People should remember that as they vilify President Bush for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, having breakfast, etc. Defending this country means making unpopular decisions. One thing people on both sides should admit about our current president is that he does not shy away from challenges. When difficult decisions about national security are on the table, President Bush will make the decision that he thinks is best for the country, no matter how difficult or unpopular.
One could easily imagine that a book such as this, written by a former FBI Director, filled with behind the scenes stories, would be previewed in the big news magazines such as Time and Newsweek. After all Time put Hillary on its cover when they ran an exerpt from her bland, predictable, unnewsworthy book. And they put Bill on the cover when his book came out.
Louis Freeh on the cover? No. An exerpt from the book? No. Zero, zip nada. As we talk about regularly, the media works via an agenda, and if a story does not fit that agenda, you will have to go elsewhere to find it. So this week, with the ex-FBI Director and ex-President and his team fighting it out over how this country responded to the early attacks from Al Qaeda and neither news magazine has nary a word about it. Hilllary and Bill get the cover, Clinton critics, even from the highest levels of the government, get the back of the hand.
Among the chestnuts in this new book that Time and Newsweek have declared unworthy,
Settling a score, Louis J. Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under President Bill Clinton and in the first six months of the Bush presidency, asserts in a new book that Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, was “basically a second-tier player” who had little access to power and was in no position to issue credible warnings in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Ah, Richard Clarke, another meglomaniac in search of the cameras.
“With Bill Clinton,” Mr. Freeh writes in a chapter called “Bill and Me,” “the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones, never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting, it was leading him in the wrong direction, and he lacked the discipline to pull back once he found himself stepping into trouble. Worse, he had been behaving that way so long that the closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out.”
This nugget has received the most attention,
Freeh also alleges that Clinton refused to personally ask Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to allow the FBI to question suspects in the â??96 Khobar Tower attacks who were in Saudi custody. Freeh writes: â??Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudisâ?? reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.â?Â
Clinton, of course, denied and personally ducked this question and sent out Sandy Burglar of all people to defend him. How ironic that a man recently busted for stealing classified documents from the National Archives, was sent out to defend Clinton on national security. Here is what the admitted thief and probation violator had to say,
“The president strongly raised the need for Saudi officials to cooperate with us on the investigation into the attack on Khobar Towers at the time when the FBI was attempting to gain access to the suspects. The president did not raise in any fashion the issue of his library.”
Well that settles it. Right?
Saudis, Arabs Bankrolled Clinton Library
The names of most of the 113,000 donors to Bill Clinton’s presidential library remain a closely guarded secret, but a new report claims that the facility was heavily funded by the Saudi royal family and other wealthy Arabs.
According to Monday’s New York Sun, the $165 million complex was funded in part by gifts of $1 million or more each from the Saudi royals and three Saudi businessmen.
History will not be kind to Bill Clinton, and he knows it.