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That’s a lot of thwarting. How did he do that? Well, for one thing he tripled the counterterrorism budget for the FBI. And doubled counterterrorism funding overall. And rolled up al Qaeda cells in more than twenty countries. And created a top-level national security post to coordinate all federal counter-terrorism activity.

His first crime bill contained stringent antiterrorism legislation. As did his second. His administration sponsored a series of simulations to see how local, state, and federal officials should coordinate their responses to a terrorist strike. He created a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines (including forty million doses of smallpox vaccine). He coaxed, cajoled, and badgered foreign leaders to join in the fight internationally or to do more within their own borders. And a huge long list of other stuff.

“By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him,” Barton Gellman reported in his definitive four-part series for the Washington Post. Clinton’s, he wrote, was the “first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort.”

Now, you know how Washington is. It’s almost impossible to get anything done unless both parties are willing to put politics aside and work together. So, on this counterterrorism stuff, you’re thinking the Republicans must have been cooperating the whole way. Isn’t that what you’re thinking? If so, I wish I lived in the same fantasy world as you. No, once the Republicans took hold of Congress, they fought Clinton with the same bitterness that the hostile Whig Congress fought President Polk during the storied second half of his first term. I still get angry thinking about that.

Just as the Whigs fought Polk every inch of the way on tariff reform, so did Republicans fight Clinton on counterterrorism spending. When Clinton asked for more antiterrorism funding in 1996, Orrin “Loose Lips” Hatch objected. “The administration would be wise to utilize the resources Congress has already provided before it requests additional funding.”

The year before, after the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, Republicans rejected Clinton’s proposed expansion of the intelligence agencies’ wiretap authority in order to combat terrorism. Speaker Gingrich explained his opposition by questioning the FBI’s integrity. On Fox News Sunday, Gingrich said, “When you have an agency that turns nine hundred personnel files over to people like Craig Livingstone . . . it’s very hard to justify giving that agency more power.” Gingrich, of course, was making a remark about Filegate, one of the many Fox-hyped investigations that yielded zip and then fizzled out. It is unusual to see a man of Gingrich’s integrity compromise national security in order to score a cheap political point. Just proves that even the finest of our public servants can slip now and then.

Gingrich was more supportive in 1998, when Clinton struck targets in Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawk missiles in retaliation for terrorist strikes against our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. “The President did exactly the right thing,” said Gingrich. “By doing this we’re sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists.” See? He’s not so bad.

And that’s why I just know there must be some good explanation for why, on September 13, 2001, Newt said on Fox, “The lesson has to be that firing a few Tomahawks, dropping a few bombs is totally inadequate,” and implored Bush to “recognize that the Clinton policy failed.” On the surface this might seem to be a spitefully worded direct contradiction to his earlier position. But I think maybe Newt was having some trouble at home with his new wife, the former staffer he started porking while he was still married to his second wife. I mean, when good people say hurtful things, there’s always something going on inside that none of us can truly know.

Immediately after the embassy bombings, Clinton issued a presidential directive authorizing the assassination of Osama