the most interesting thing i see about this whole path to 9/11 miniseries controversy is how it's another example of the right's utter fixation with president clinton. (and if you have any serious doubt whether the miniseries is anything more than a loose-with-the-facts hit job see here, here, here, here, and the last 24+ hours worth of posts here)
it's an odd phenomenon, i see it in my own comment section all the time. it's like the entire clinton era is some kind of safe harbor in the minds of many right-wingers. so long as you can shove as much blame into the eight year period between 1993 and 2000, bush is magically absolved from responsibility for any failure that happened when he was president. facts will be bent, spun and sometimes out-and-out fabricated, all for the lofty goal of pinning some more blame on a former president and (they seem to think) washing bush's own hands of any fault.
it's especially strange when i see it here because i don't really come across as any great fan of clinton. almost always the "blame clinton" argument is apropos of nothing. and it's not even relevant to the real issue of bush's responsibility. blame is not energy. "conservation of blame" is not a law of the universe. it is possible, indeed, it's quite common, for one person to be at fault for something happening and for a different person to also be at fault for the exact same incident. in other words, saying clinton is to blame doesn't mean that bush isn't also. indeed, it often isn't even relevant to the question.
besides, blaming a sitting president for failures that happen while he is still in office is an entirely different animal than pinning blame on a past president who has left office. in theory at least, we can still hold a sitting president responsible and try to get him to change his policies if we can demonstrate that those policies are a mistake. pointing out a sitting president's flaws has actual immediate practical value. pointing out the flaws of a president who left office years ago is more an issue of history. sure, we can use history to guide our actions today, but criticizing a former leader is not as immediately useful because it is too late to change that leader's behavior.
sometimes i think that a lot of the right's fixation on clinton is irrational, almost pathological. in my mind this ridiculous miniseries is just another symptom of the pathology.
(E & P link via roxanne)
