more president bashing

...of the accurate kind.

Re: clinton's (spit) claim that the Bush administration had 8 months to work against terror and did nothing, Varifrank pulls some facts out of the memory hole:

See, I dont remember that. What I remember was Washington D.C. personnel and infrastructure at total loggerheads because the previous adminstration did everything short of lighting fire to the office buildings to keep the incoming Bush administration from being able to set up its government. It was an unprecendented display of childish,unprofessional, sophomoric crap. I remember lots of little cutesy games being played with keyboards and superglue and the near universal removal of the "W" from all computer keyboards. I remember President Clinton doing just about everything in his legal power to make it hard on the incoming Bush administration to be able to get started. I remember walkouts by union staff in D.C. office buildings and other forms of soft sabotage in the first few months of the Bush Administration. Did that stop President Bush? Well it sure as hell didnt help, and if it effected just "George W. Bush - the person" well thats fine, but the truth is that crap like that cost the government many, many manhours and those manhours had to come from someplace, didnt they? I also remember a dangerous little incident with China over a P-3 Orion and a Chinese fighter that had to be handled with deftness in the first few months, this was a might distracting to the government at the time Here you are, new to the job and the very real prospect of "war with the Chinese" and you havent even gotten your name on the White House stationary yet.

I remember "Jumpin Jim Jeffords" switching sides and throwing the Senate into the opposition partys hands just in time for the nomination process to slow to a crawl in the summer of 2001. I remember Robert Hanssen of the FBI being arrested for spying for Russia and I remember that it took until nearly August for most of the major offices, such as the head of the FBI to be filled, thanks to the antics of people like Jumpin' Jim Jeffords.

President Clinton wants to paint the 'Summer of 2001' as a period of peaceful calm, where the birds were singing and the squirrels were carefully gathering nuts on the Capitol Mall, but President Bush had his hands full trying to keep the collapsing Clinton economy from becoming a full on disaster. That summer, the world was certain that Bush would not get his tax cuts because of his weak political situation, but he got them, not because he was a great politician but because everyone knew, on both sides of the aisle that unless swift action was taken, we were looking at the very real possibility of an economic depression. The world losing faith in our banking institutions and our stock market was a very, very real threat in the Summer of 2001. It was dealt with successfully, and like all of President Bushs' successful stories, quickly forgotten and jammed into the 'memory hole'. In September of 2001, whatever cool designs we were drawing on the etch-a-sketch of that years history were obliterated forever.

and concludes:

I actually feel sorry for (slick willie). He is condemmed to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out why everyone is laughing at him behind his back. The rest of us are just looking at the historical record with a somewhat objective fashion but that poor bastard actually believes what he thinks he remembers about his record.