Bill Clinton, 2005:
“You can't say, ‘Please don't be mean to me. Please let me win sometimes.’ Give me a break here[.] If you don't want to fight for the future and you can’t figure out how to beat these people then find something else to do.”
Lots of people are already complaining about the politicization of the London plot. Glenn Greenwald (via Benen) provides numerous examples from the right-wing blogosphere, which seized upon the news in record time. John Aravosis points to an article indicating that the White House knew of the plot last weekend (thus suggesting it coordinated its recent media strategy with it).
You know what I say to that — boo-frickin’-hoo. Get over it. The GOP politicizes terrorism — that’s what they do. They’ve been doing it for five years. They did it to start a war. They did it to win an election. And they’re going to keep doing it until they lose. People can moan and whine all day about how mean and unfair they’re being, or they can fight fire with fire and try to beat them. And so I’m not doing the obligatory “can’t we put partisanship aside in times like this” to show my reasonable centrism. Instead, I’ll take a stab at politicizing terrorism and say this — the failed UK plot illustrates why the people in charge of anti-terrorism policy shouldn’t be in charge of anti-terrorism policy anymore. It also demonstrates the utter failure of the Iraq War as anti-terrorism policy. And finally, it shows why Republicans should lose this fall.
Today's editorial in the NYTimes, unrestricted via this Democratic Underground post, makes a gentler proposal:
Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To find out what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan.
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