They Really Mean It: 9/11 Doesn’t Count

by tristero

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about Giuliani’s latest lie entitled, 9/11 Doesn’t Count. That was sarcastic exaggeration, of course. I really didn’t believe that Giuliani, or anyone else for that matter, no matter how crazy or politically ruthless, would ever seriously assert, under any circumstances, that 9/11 didn’t count.

Huh. Little did I know:

In late November, Dana Perino, a former Bush press secretary, said, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” In late December, Mary Matalin, a former senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, said, “We inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.” She clearly meant Sept. 11, not the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and until 2001 was the worst terrorist act in this country.

“Republicans tend not to count 9/11 against Bush,” Margaret Carlson, a columnist for Bloomberg News, said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “That’s, like, not on his watch because ‘Oh, we didn’t know about that before.’”

Now, Mr. Haberman deserves praise for rounding up these disgustingly deliberate Republican lies and exposing them in a major newspaper, albeit buried deep inside its pages. However, by not directly rebutting Carlson, he unintentionally let stand her odious spin.

Of course, we did know “about that” – bin Laden’s murderous intent to attack Americn targets – in part because Clinton had tried like hell to get Republicans to get their faces out of his crotch and focus on the threat from al Qaeda. Even more specifically, the Bush administration knew that in the summer of 2001, “bin Laden [was] determined to attack inside the US.”. And what was Bush’s response?

,,,an unnamed CIA briefer… flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” *

So, even if Republicans were prepared to give Bush the benefit of the doubt before, they no longer have even the remotest excuse to do so.

And since that is the case, none of them – Giuliani, Perino, Matalin, and Carlson, in the present case – deserve the opportunity to influence the public discourse without being immediately, and forcefully, rebutted with the actual facts. That Stephanopolous let Giuliani get away with that lie is outrageous. That CNN let Carlson spin that lie without objecting is equally so.

We – ie, readers of this blog – know all this. But as the pattern Haberman reports makes clear, Republican operatives – whose cynicism knows no bounds – are betting that Americans have already begun to forget exactly what happened after the GOP stole the presidency in 2000 and wreaked such havoc on us.. That is why it is incumbent upon responsible journalists like Haberman not to let scoundrels like Carlson explain away Giuliani’s cold, calculated lie as merely a different way to view the world.

Surely, Carlson’s spin is as self-evidently absurd to Haberman as it is to us. But, as long experience with rightwing GOP nonsense has demonstrated, merely holding it up for ridicule is not enough to stop it. As long as they think they can get away with it, they will.

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*And of course, ignoring that August memo was only the tip of the iceberg, as even a cursory familiarity with the history of the first nine months of the Bush presidency would make clear. Furthermore, that Bush had ignored clear signs of a major imminent domestic attack was well-known long before the publication of Susskind’s book.

[Edited slightly after initial posting.]