We Could Never be a Couple Hun / Fuck Love / All I Got For Hoes is Hard Dick and Bubblegum

If I were a conservative, I imagine I'd be utterly ashamed by the breadth and depth of failure of an administration I shouted at the top of my lungs to support.  I also imagine that in my grasping for defenses of the Bush administration, I might harp on the fact that my President only oversaw one most deadly terrorist attack in American history and if you remove that one day, he's kept us totally safe.  (Similarly, if you exclude the two recessions begun under President Bush, there were 52 straight months of housing-bubble-related job growth. Awesome!)

Now, the liberal reaction to the "he kept us safe" claim, is that, yes, he did keep us safe, if you decline to include the worst terrorist attack in American history.  And that's a pretty good response.  Conversely, it's true that we haven't been hit since 9/11.  But, I'd like to point out, that, contrary to all the pants-shitting after 9/11, when something like two-thirds of Americans thought another attack would come within a year, it isn't even obvious al-Qaeda has tried to attack within the U.S. since 9/11.  They attacked the WTC in 1993, and it was a full 8 years later before they tried again.  Relatedly, after U.S. involvement in Iraq, al-Qaeda shifted its strategy to attack U.S. allies with troops in Iraq in Europe as part of an effort to isolate the U.S. political.  Thus, Madrid and London.  Granted, the American effort in Afghanistan has limited al-Qaeda's ability to plan and conduct attacks, but it's entirely possible that if Bush had done nothing after 9/11 he'd still be leaving office now having overseen only one most-deadly terrorist attack in American history.