I know everyone wants to take a breather after the election, but it's probably a good thing to remember that the wingnuts never rest.
Already, they're sharpening their knives should Obama select Jamie Gorelick as attorney general:
She has also drawn criticism for her role at the Justice Department, in which she allegedly created an intelligence “wall” that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservatives called for her removal from the Sept. 11 commission, but her fellow members rallied around her and said critics were distorting her record. The criticism grew so heated that the F.B.I. investigated a death threat against her family, and President Bush had to intervene personally to stop the Justice Department from releasing sealed reports involving her. Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick’s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission.
What CNN reported at the time:
"I can confirm that I've received threats at my office and my home," she told CNN on Saturday. "I did get a bomb threat to my home."
She added, "I have gotten a lot of very vile e-mails. The bomb threat was by phone."
ABC News first reported the story Saturday.
The threats were "scary," she said, but added that she was "not intimidated enough to resign from the commission."
All this occurred after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft accused Gorelick of authoring a memo that he and other conservatives blamed for creating a bureaucratic "wall" that they said caused the intelligence failures leading to 9/11 (a dubious claim at best, considering that Ashcroft had previously testified elsewhere that this "wall" had existed since the 1980s).
The conservative noise machine leapt into action -- most notably Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that "Gorelick really ran the place while Janet Reno was the face of the Justice Department" and that she "erected a wall and because the Clinton administration determined that they were gonna fight terrorism not as a war but as a legal matter."
As you can see from the video, Bill O'Reilly also chimed in on Fox. Right-wing operative Dick Morris also said on Fox News: "Of ALL of the public officials in the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, the ONE who is MOST directly responsible, in my judgment, for 9/11 happening, is Jamie Gorelick."
Expect an encore.
