Clinton tops Bush in poll

"The man below is this much more popular than I am!"

A recent CNN poll finds that former President Bill Clinton still hasn't lost his mojo; his popularity endures. Like that's a difficult thing to do, considering this administration would screw up a two-car funeral. The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. You can get the whole story Here.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not at all surprised by this poll. I'd have given my left arm for Clinton to have been able to run against Bush - he would have mopped the floor with Dubya's snide little smirk. The bumbling W would have been for no match for Clinton the master politician. Anyway, I laugh at what many Republicans will probably say that this is a "liberal network [CNN]" poll. Not so fast. Fox News recently reported that Bush's approval rating is hovering around 33%, and that was a few weeks ago, and it's even lower now. A few days ago, I heard 29% on TV, but I don't remember where I heard it.

Anyway, a few thoughts:

Clinton got a 2-to-1 margin in handling the economy: 63% to Bush's 26%. In foreign affairs, Clinton enjoyed a 56% to 32% edge; and in the handling of natural disasters, Clinton had a 51% to 30% advantage. (I question that last one - where the hell was that 30% during Hurricane Katrina? but I digress.)

I wish there would have been a question about terrorism. Clinton did more to combat terrorism than probably any other president, and I'm including Dubya here. I've been doing lots of political reading about terrorism lately, and my favorite misnomer about Clinton was that he "didn't do anything about terrorism," courtesy of right-wing hacks. Yea, right. Probably my favorite goes something like this, and I've read and heard people say some form of this about Clinton:

"The first World Trade Center attack happened on Clinton's watch, and 9-11 happened only 8 months after Bush took office."

Yah! Well, Clinton's administration only captured those responsible for the '93 bombing - Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah. They were convicted and are behind bars, serving life in prison. I wonder how tough they think Clinton was on terrorism? The person responsible for 9-11 was Osama bin Laden, and the prison where he's incarcerated is in... oh wait, he's still at large, almost five years later. But we got Saddam!

The '93 attack happened 38 days after Clinton took office, and 9-11 happened nearly 8 months after he left office, yet he gets blamed for both by myopic Republicans who refuse to acknowlege the facts. Amazing. It's well documented that the new Bush administration, leading up to the inauguration in January '01, thought that Clinton's team was "obsessed" with terrorism. I've read numerous accounts of this, most notably from Richard Clarke, who worked for both Clinton and Dubya. But, GOP amnesia quickly set in after 9-11.

One more quick example - some people to this day believe we did not retaliate following the August 1998 al Queda attacks on U.S. embassies in Nariobi and Tanzania in Africa. Clinton did all he could with a Republican Congress. He ordered a missile attack on one of bin Laden's compounds, and we just missed him by hours. However, when this missile retaliation occurred, it was right around the time he was testifying about oral sex, and virtually every Republican leader in Congress questioned the timing of the attack. Would this be the same thing as Reagan invading Grenada two days after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983, when 241 Americans died? Reagan's response to the scum who killed the Marines? Cut and run from Lebanon.

Clinton attacked when the CIA told him they knew of bin Laden's whereabouts, period. The operation, called Infinite Reach, tried to get bin Laden, and it just missed. In addition, seven people have been jailed or remain in custody in relation to the embassy bombings. Others are still at large, but to say we did nothing is GOP-grade bullshit.

I actually feel less safe under Bush than I did under Clinton. The issue is a lot more complicated than I'm willing to get into here (my blog entries have been way too long lately!), but I feel our borders are wide open. This has gone largely underreported since 9-11, but the press is starting to take wake up and take notice (thankfully).

Something that enraged me on the actual day of 9-11 and in the days immediately after was when I heard some Republicans actually say out loud, "Thank God Gore isn't in there."

I wonder if they still feel that way now? I suspect even the most ardent of Bush supporters would hesitate to answer yes, and recent Bush opinion/popularity polls bear this out.