Here's something I let off at The Chicago Report debunking the idea that Clarke is unassailable and the Bush administration should just give up on fighting back:
One of the things that makes it so annoying about complaints regarding the changeover between the Bush and Clinton administrations is that everybody is overlooking the toxic effects of the changeover sabotage. I'm not just talking about porn in the printers and broken W keys on keyboards. There were a bunch of last minute policy orders and regulations that were simply done to please core Democratic constituencies but would be impossible for any administration to sustain as in the national interest. This included foreign policy where Clinton did a last minute signing on the ICC even though it had been repudiated 95-0 in the Senate even before it went out for signature and ratification.Posted by TMLutas at March 26, 2004 10:43 AMIn other words, it was dead but the Clinton administration thought it was OK politically to embarrass the US worldwide by signing on to such a treaty knowing that it would have to be repudiated by Bush, and soon. In such an atmosphere, what confidence could the Bush administration have in anti-terrorism? Was it real or was it just another policy booby-trap? This would have explained a great deal of delay in getting serious work done on terrorism under the Bush watch.
The Bush administration took one in the shorts for the country in their early effort to 'change the tone' in Washington. They purposefully didn't keep very good records of the damage and have avoided charging the Clinton administration with policy sabotage. It is unlikely that they will be officially going after them at this point on those grounds. They've got too much invested in the let the dead bury the dead policy they came in with.
But we shouldn't forget that the sabotage happened. It was real, and it had both silly and substantive elements to it. In an administration where the highest priority was terrorism and where they viscerally knew that lives were on the line, they would never have done such counterproductive things. This, more than any administration statement demonstrates the fraud that Clinton and his administration truly cared about national security.