I've never been one to bash (much) Bush's pre-9/11 obliviousness to the Al Qaeda threat -- he definitely wasn't the only one sleepwalking towards catastrophe that summer. Like most critics of Path to 9/11, I'm also not pretending the Clinton Administration was a model of anti-terrorist vigilance on its watch. But I think any fair reading of the record, including the 9/11 Commission report, will show what an obscene mockery ABC and the White House presented to the nation's couch potatoes tonight.
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There's not much point in kvetching about it now, I suppose. This is the United States of Amnesia, and history is for losers. (A friend of mine likes to say that in the Middle East, what happened a thousand years ago is far more important than yesterday's news. Here, they're both irrelevant.) Still, the prime-time propaganda we've been subjected to over the past few days makes that "you've covered your ass now" crack a particularly acidic pill to have to swallow.