The Consistency of Hobgoblin Stew
Now Playing: it meant something a while ago
The Gateway Pundit reports on Michael Scheuer's recent remarks to the German magazine Die Zeit concerning the practice of rendition (emphases in the linked post):

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.

"President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.

"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."

Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the "renditions" program, which he said included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.

At the time, he said, the CIA did not arrest or imprison anyone itself.

"That was done by the local police or secret services," he said, adding that the prisoners were never taken to US soil. "President Clinton did not want that."

I'm sure there must be some sort of hierarchy of argumentation in which pointing out that Clinton was the author of a program for which Bush the Younger is being pilloried is considered rather low-grade, but what shouldn't be is rejecting hypocrisy, however weak it is to argue for mitigation. Which is my intoxicatedly convoluted way of saying that it would save the various factions in political society valuable time if they would simply stop accusing this President of crimes for which his immediate predecessor essentially laid the rationale ---if not incurred the necessity itself through negligence--- of pursuing extraordinary measures against these savages. Nothing is more embarrassing to me than to see how quick to emulate Monica Lewinsky the anti-war Left are when Bill Clinton makes his peacenik rumblings heard. Don't they have some obligation to recognize Clinton's culpability in the al-Qaedist threat? Why not? Because when he lied, no one died? Because he didn't prosecute an elective war? You warm and squishy little diaper-fillers with your childish nonsense! Only ignorance of History can explain your stupidity. What the fuck else does Bill Clinton have to do right now except to play good cop/bad cop with the Democratic Party's next Presidential nominee?

You know why Clinton's crimes are so petty in retrospect? Because they barely had to outclass their perpetrator.