Condi Had To Lie

So apparently Condoleezza Rice had to rebut the rebuttal from President Clinton and spin it back around:

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice said Monday during a meeting with editors and reporters at the New York Post.

The newspaper published her comments Tuesday, after Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday" in a combative interview in which he defended his handling of the threat posed by bin Laden and said he "worked hard" to have the al-Qaida leader killed [...]

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," she said.

Rice took exception to Clinton's statement that he "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for incoming officials when he left office.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., which also owns Fox News Channel.

In the TV interview, Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of a "conservative hit job" and asked: "I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, 'Why didn't you do anything about the Cole?' I want to know how many people you asked, 'Why did you fire Dick Clarke?'"

He was referring to the USS Cole, attacked by terrorists in Yemen in 2000, and former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke.

Rice said Clarke "left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security."

Barbara O'Brien at the Mahablog has made minced meat of these assertions, but I knew it just by looking at them. Having read Richard Clarke's book, I knew that Clinton told Bush during the transition that his biggest issue would be terrorism. I knew that Richard Clarke wrote an impassioned plea to focus on terrorism, along with a comprehensive strategy to do so, on January 25, 2001, and there wasn't a Principals meeting on the subject until September 4. I knew that there were internal discussions about whether or not to use drone planes to spy on bin Laden in the Bush Administration, when in the Clinton Administration they used them. I knew that Bush's White House gave the Taliban $43 million dollars to thank them for helping in the war on drugs (hahahaha). I knew that Richard Clarke was in fact demoted, unable to run or even participate in the Principals meetings on terrorism.

Rice never really gave facts to back up her spun yarns. Clinton admitted he was not successful in stopping terror, because he didn't get bin Laden. Rice admits nothing.

Who's the better person?