There is a strange amnesia permeating the Republican ranks lately. On November 24, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, Dana Perino, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Spit take! This was followed about a month later by GOP strategist Mary Matalin, who said of the Bush administration, “I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” Guffaw! Now Rudy Giuliani, surprisingly, seems to be jumping on the “9/11 never happened or at least not on Bush’s watch” bandwagon. Speaking to Good Morning America’s height-challenged George Stephanopoulos this morning, Giuliani weighed in on Obama’s response to terrorism:
What he should be doing is following the right things that Bush did. One of the right things he did is treat this as a war on terror — we had no domestic attacks under Bush, we’ve had one under Obama.
Now, to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe Giuliani meant that there were no attacks under Bush after 9/11, when the war on terror was officially “declared.” But even granting that, America has been confronting Islamic terrorism since the Clinton administration. If Giuliani’s intention is to show that Bush’s supposedly flawless record is a result of the seriousness with which he took terrorism, he would also have to argue that terrorism was not an issue to take seriously before 9/11. The victims of the first World Trade Center bombing, the African embassy bombings, and the attack on the USS Cole would probably disagree.
Quote of the Day [Political Wire]
