The preternaturally stupid morning show
Fox & Friends continues to be
the lead paint of news.
“You might be madder, Donald Trump … at Bill Clinton for not taking a legitimate shot at somebody who declared war on us in the ’90s,” host Brian Kilmeade suggested this morning. Clinton, Kilmeade argued, was more responsible for the terrorist attacks that happened months after he left office because he failed to adequately warn the incoming Bush administration.
That's right, your new
Fox & Friends sputterin' point is that
Bill Clinton failed to get bin Laden, and that
Bill Clinton and his team failed to let George Dubya Bush know that the organization that had just put a very big hole in a United States warship docked in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, might continue to be a danger even after George Dubya Bush moved his things into the Oval Office a few months later.
If you are not a member of the Fox & Friends staff—in other words, not among the stupidest Americans to ever have wandered into a television studio, people who have very little memory of last Tuesday much less the before-times of the Tuesday before that, or people who spend their time between shows contemplating which of their office electrical outlets could best be used as a bong—you probably know from source after source after source that the both the outgoing Clinton administration and the CIA spent a great deal of time trying to convince the Bush administration that al Qaeda was a threat, and were rebuffed each time.
Read on.
During a transition briefing early that month at Blair House, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Tenet and his deputy James Pavitt listed Osama Bin Laden as one of America’s three most serious national-security challenges. That same month, Clarke presented National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice with a plan he had been working on since al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole the previous October. [...]
But both Clarke and Tenet grew deeply frustrated by the way top Bush officials responded. Clarke recounts that when he briefed Rice about al-Qaeda, “her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before.” On January 25, Clarke sent Rice a memo declaring that, “we urgently need…a Principals [Cabinet] level review on the al Qida [sic] network.” Instead, Clarke got a sub-cabinet, Deputies level, meeting in April, two months after the one on Iraq.
Not just rebuffed, in fact: The new, neoconservative administration appointees dismissed CIA reports of a planned terrorist attack with the nearly
Fox & Friendsian theory that Osama bin Laden was merely
pretending to be a threat to take the pressure off Iraq's tricky Saddam Hussein. Because, you see, neoconservatives are foreign policy geniuses.
[T]he same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, “the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.”
To blame the Clinton Administration for not properly warning Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the supposedly top-notch neoconservative foreign policy and military "experts" shoveled into the executive branch with notions of a
New American Century that they might need to pay a little attention to what the rest of the intelligence community considered one of the top national security threats facing the nation raises an obvious question: What, short of kidnapping top administration officials, flying them to al Qaeda headquarters, and having bin Laden's team present them with a polished PowerPoint presentation entitled "We Are Determined To Strike The U.S." could anyone in America have done to convince these brilliant neoconservative geniuses to give a damn?
Not to worry, though. This is Fox & Friends, the show by the network's stupidest people that is hand-crafted each day for the benefit of that most valued of all demographic groups: Dogs whose owners have left their television sets on for company, and Americans who like to watch television but have forgotten how their remote controls work. So, after it became clear that Donald Trump was not going to soften his position on why George Dubya Bush perhaps could have extricated his head from his posterior on the whole "terrorism" issue a bit sooner than September 12th-ish, 2001, the hosts valiantly moved on to point out that perhaps, if you don't count 9/11, the rest of his administration was pretty good, right?
When Trump refused to let up on holding Bush accountable for failing to prevent 9/11, co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck jumped in to defend the former president, pointing to his post 9/11 presidency.
Ahh, that's the stuff. I see she decided to use a power strip this time, rather than trying to pour the water directly into the wall outlet. But perhaps we'll save that for a later installment of
Fox & Friends is the lead paint of news.