Ouch: An Equal-Opportunity Failure?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

I'd always thought, because despite trying to avoid the MSM^[1], a fair bit trickles through now and again, that the C.I.A.'s utter intel failures surrounding the rise and deployment of Islamic terrorism was a non-partisan problem: an equal-opportunity. Then I discover, in the process of trying to track down another MSM aside^[2], that little could be further from the truth:

...the Commission’s final report, in its ballyhooed bipartisanship, was a political exercise which took great pains not to delve too deeply into the eight Clinton years prior to 9/11, lest anyone think they might have had a smidge more to do with what went wrong than the eight Bush months.
Consequently, little if any attention was paid to the fact that the Clinton administration sought to cash in on a post-Cold War “peace dividend” by drastically slashing intelligence resources, even as Somalia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a slew of subsequent jihadist strikes elucidated radical Islam’s rise. Or to the fact that, as the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz has reported, the number of deployed CIA intelligence officers around the world fell from a Reagan era high of 8000 to fewer than 1000 during the Clinton years. Or that President Clinton refused to meet with his first CIA Director, the superb Jim Woolsey, a stark contrast from Bush pere and fils, who preferred daily personal briefings from the head of the intelligence community. Clinton evidently did think highly enough of his next CIA Director, John Deutsch, to pardon him -- sparing Deutsch a felony indictment for recklessly mishandling classified information."
from "C.I.A. and al Queda by Andrew McCarthy

Ah, Mr. Clinton... Even before we found about them, his many, many peccadilloes kept interfering with his ability to perform his duties as the head of the executive branch.

So once again, the left has accused the right of doing something it has been, is, or will probably be doing both often and vigorously. In this case, the sin of screwing up the C.I.A. I suppose, from a political perspective, having discovered that you're failing at every one the governmental duties with which you've been charged, (and several of the ones you just made up for yourselves) the practical course is to jump up and down, scream and point your finger at the opposition: But he did it, too!

I have enough toddler-tantrums in my life. I wish our congresscritters would mature some.

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[1] It's not what you don't know that's so dangerous, but what you think you know that just isn't so. These days, if you don’t have the time to research an issue; you're better off staying clear of it: at least then you'll know you don’t know. In these glory days of intramanents and digital information, back-tracking [***waves library card like a banner***] is dead easy.

[2] An E friggin' W movie review in which the writer casually remarks that the C.I.A. created al Queda. The general rule of thumb is that there is probably something interesting and truth-related in any such comment (Read about this one here, but Any Given MSM Reporter^TM is going to get something seriously wrong. Distrust and verify...