“Too Obsessed”

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President Clinton also claimed on Fox News yesterday that “all the right-wingers” believed he was “too obsessed” with bin Laden, that he “did too much” in going after the al Qaeda head. The reality is a bit different. Many conservatives applauded Clinton’s decision to strike in Sudan and Afghanistan following the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In November 1998, for example, Andrew McCarthy wrote a lengthy piece in the Weekly Standard in support of the strikes, but he also explained why the Clinton administration’s overall approach to combating the terror threat was woefully inadequate. Similar to what Reuel Marc Gerecht would argue in the wake of the USS Cole bombing, McCarthy pushed the administration to treat international terrorism as “a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue.” He wrote:

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