Tim Blair

And quite a few pounds less.

Ha. I really enjoy Spinsanity. They give the conservatives a hard time too, but it's all good.

For more on easily caught-out lies by celebrity leftists playing grownup politics, check out the Terry Teachout thing that Instapundit just linked to, starring Academy Award Winner Tim Robbins and Presidential Nominee Lyndon LaRouche:

Mystic Blitherer

al franken is an asshat.

Heh. You're just jealeous 'cause Franken is funny, and you don't have any funny guys.

sdf:

You can put the pacifier back in now.

Um...sdf, do you ever actually read this blog? Or Al Franken? I would consider Tim a hell of a lot funnier than Franken, who doesn't have a single good line the SNL writers didn't give him.

SDF,
Yep, that Stuart Smalley film was a huge comedic success. Dipshit.

Franken's a goober, but Michael Moore has real potential. I truly believe that if there is another "Star Wars" movie made, Moore would fill the role of Jabba the Hut very nicely.

Franken wears tailored suits? He needs a new tailor.

Unfortunately for your thesis, actually reading what Berger said leads to the opposite conclusion:

"...we used that time very efficiently to convey to my successor the most important information - what was going on and what situations they faced.

Number one among those was terrorism and Al Qaida. And I told that to my successor. She has acknowledged that publicly, so I'm not violating any private conversation. We briefed them fully on what we were doing - on what else was under consideration and what the threat was. I personally attended part of that briefing to emphasize how important that was."

Part of the presentation included a slide entitled, "Al Qaeda: Roll Back".

For sake of argument, let's say the claim is true. That said, can you blame the Bush administration for backing away from a plan the previous administration didn't have the guts to implement themselves? It's not like Osama bin Laden suddenly appeared out of nowhere right before the 2000 elections.

Sure, the Clintonistas would have fixed "everything" if Bill could just have had a couple more terms. I believe that.

This is just more Clinton bashing. Clinton did so have a plan, it was code named the "million dollar missile to take out a ten dollar tent" plan and it would have worked too but Clinton ran out of time.

Dwight,
Jeez, and I thought Clinton's plan was called "Leave The Heavy Lifting To Someone Else"

I actually liked "Stuart Saves His Family" ("Hey, you forgot your subpoena!"), and Lowry does say that some parts of Franken's book are funny. But as far as politics go, Al's cuckoo.

I would consider Tim a hell of a lot funnier than Franken, who doesn't have a single good line the SNL writers didn't give him.

While I agree that Tim is funnier than Al, it's not true that Franken never did anything worthwhile. One Man Mobile Uplink Unit was consistently hilarious, and he actually was one of the writers giving out good lines.

As Franken puts it, "Bill Clinton's far-reaching plan to eliminate al Qaeda root and branch was completed only a few weeks before the inauguration of George W. Bush." Franken elaborates on this theme at length in his War on Terror chapter called "Operation Ignore."

Pardon me for pointing out the bleeding obvious, but if al Qaeda was eliminated 'root and branch' before Bill Clinton left office, THEN SEPTEMBER 11 COULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED!!!

Actually, a funny-as-heck conservative writer these days is P.J. O'Rourke, of "giving money and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys" in Parliament of Whores.

tonight NBC was showing OBL pictures taken from a predator as a proof of Clinton's "aggressive pursuit" of terror mastermind. 4 years later & still apologising for Clinton't failures...

Via Atrios, more on Clinton and Bush efforts re OBL:

Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the U.S. administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months and was still refining a plan to use one armed with missiles to kill the al-Qaida leader when Sept. 11 unfolded, current and former U.S. officials say.

...

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days, and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.

In November 2001, an armed drone helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information.

These officials said that within days of President George W. Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.

Re: "...we used that time very efficiently to convey to my successor the most important information - what was going on and what situations they faced.

Number one among those was terrorism and Al Qaida."

You offer this as though it was some great insight or intelligence coup handed over to the Bushies by the previous administration. Pardon me....but this was obvious to everyone on the whole f****** planet after the 1993 WTC bombings and driven home by the USS Cole. So basically, we are left with the Clinton administration claiming to tell the new administration what everyone already knew. The only difference is that Bush actually, you know, acted.

Bravo Romeo Delta: "Actually, a funny-as-heck conservative writer these days is P.J. O'Rourke, of 'giving money and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys' in Parliament of Whores."

Agreed, O'Rourke is funnier than anyone commenting on politics today, but as your quote suggests, P.J. is more of a libertarian nowadays.

On Franken: What I read of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" (Al likes subtle titles) was clever, but he's no Dave Barry.

pointing out the obvious

Let's say by some miracle the Clinton administration, or even the Bush administration had assassinated Bin Laden before September 11, 2001. So what. It would not have stopped the 9-11 attacks or broken the Al Queda organization.

I think it's terribly funny how the left wing has fixated on the failure to capture Osama. Osama nowadays spends his time scurrying from one cave to the next just ahead of the Hellfire missile with his name on it. The real measure of success against Al Queda is rooting out it's membership, money and command structure, not popping one terrorist zit.

Only the large scale efforts of the Bush administration after 9-11 began to deal with Al Queda in a serious and systematic way. Who cares if Clinton had some pie-in-the-sky plan to kill Bin Laden. It wouldn't have solved anything even if Clinton had the balls to implement the plan.

Al Franken? wasn't he the porter in "trading places"? You know, he had to load the Gorilla onto the train... That's all I know of him.

Hey, maybe Kerry actually said "Moore" leaders.