Posner's at it again

You may have missed the editorial by Gerald Posner, "celebrated" author of Case Closed, in which he chimes in on the Clarke controversy. Gerry's bottom line: Don't blame Bush -- or rather, don't blame just Bush. Blame Clinton too. Perhaps a little more.

To buttress the point, he relies on the memory of Clinton's ill-chosen advisor, Dick Morris:

"President Clinton seemed curiously uninterested when it came to terrorism. His former political advisor, Dick Morris, has said: "You could talk to him about income redistribution and he would talk to you for hours and hours. Talk to him about terrorism and all you'd get was a series of grunts.""

Richard Clarke gives us a rather different picture. He says Clinton took a tougher stance on terror than did Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, or the current president.

"They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia," Clarke said. "They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up embassies around the world. Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S. soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,] Lebanon, and there was no retaliation. Contrast that with the first Bush administration where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of] Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation. I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal. In fact, so much that when the Bush people came into office, they thought I was a little crazy, a little obsessed with this little terrorist bin Laden."

Why, one wonders, does Gerry toss aside all of this history? Why does he prefer the far-from-unbiased assessment of Dick Morris, who has been toadying up to the Murdoch types for years? (The ultra-cons will ignore Morris' humiliating exposure as a foot fetishist as long as he keeps singing the kind of song they like to hear.)

Then again, how can we be absolutely confident that Morris said the words attributed to him? In Case Closed, Posner claimed to have interviewed people who later denied having talked to him.