Who was a better President: George Bush or Bill Clinton?

[rocketpig]

The Ghost of RubangB said:
@rocketpig, what I mean about Bush being soft on terrorism until 9/11 is that... he got elected... and did nothing for 8 months. He was on vacation the whole time. He had a tax cut, and he cut funding for Planned Parenthoods on foreign soil, and went hunting until 9/11 happened. There was a gigantic pool of information that the CIA and the Clinton administration had built on Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden during all the attacks of the 90's. We had a terrorist problem. Bush sat on his hands and waited for the big one to get all riled up and do something.

Honestly, what did you expect him to do? It takes 8 months for the government to buy a new toilet seat. Clinton, on the other hand, had 8 years to go after domestic terrorists and was pretty damned unsuccessful in doing so. The 9/11 operation was well under way during his watch. A lot of our current intelligence problems can also be blamed on him and his intelligence advisors. As a country, we were caught with our pants down because the entire intelligence community had failed to transition to the "new war" (terrorism) after the fall of the Soviet Union. Pretty much all of that happened while Clinton was President.

I dislike Bush as much as the next guy but when it comes to terrorism and intelligence, it's hard to blame anyone other than Mr. William Clinton. He was the one holding the keys when all this shit started to go down and was unsuccessful in quelling the problem before it ballooned into something huge.

And, whether you like or hate Bush, you have to admit that there hasn't been an attack on American soil since 9/11. Some think that's just a coincidence or luck (and I'm not going to really disagree), but them's the facts. You can't argue the results.