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03.22.04.4:08 pm

Would Gore have done better?

James Carville's thoughts on whether or not Gore would have stood a better shot of stopping the 9/11 attacks (bear in mind that this was written in late 2003, yet still holds water even after last night's revelation):

"To believe that we are better off in terms of foreign policy because George W. Bush is president is to believe that the smarter and more experienced man--Al Gore--would have put together an administration that would have done a worse job relating to the world and responding to the attacks of September 11.

In fact, I'll go a step further and say that I think if Al Gore was president, it is significantly less likely that the attacks of September 11 would have happened in the first place. Here's why. As vice president, Al Gore actually read all of his daily intelligence briefings, and made notes of questions he wanted answered in the margins. Gore was the one who had waiting for him, should he have been elected president, an actual plan to target and take out Osama Bin Laden and his al Qaeda henchmen--the same plan that was given to Condoleezza Rice by Dick Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, and promptly put on the shelf, only to reappear again--according to the White House--on September 10.

Gore's national security advisor probably wouldn't have ignored Clinton's national security advisor, Sandy Berger, when he said that they should 'spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.'

Since Gore was one of the people urging the incoming Bush officials to consider using predator drones equipped with hellfire missiles against Bin Laden, he probably wouldn't have pooh-poohed the idea--as the Bush folks did--only to realize after September 11 how effective it was.

Gore was a guy who wouldn't have taken a record number of days of vacation in the first year of his presidency, making it harder for him to get his briefings--including that fateful briefing Bush got in August while on his ranch in Crawford that is alleged to have warned of terrorists seeking to smash planes into buildings."

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