Before you start whining that I can't stop talking about Bill Clinton, let's look at the people who are really obsessed with him - the liberals of America. A story in the October 22, 2001 issue of New York magazine has what must be the 19th story about Clinton supposedly missing his chance at greatness because this horrible attack didn't happen on his watch. Now, am I supposed to ignore this? I can't do that. If you don't hear what I think, you haven't heard anything.

What gets me is, these liberals are admitting that Clinton was not great! "Oh, yeah, he had the economy," they're basically saying, without using the words. "But that was just living off previous administrations. He didn't have a crisis where he could prove his true mettle. He tried in the Middle East, but it didn't work." Well, we all know what happened there. Bill Clinton didn't actually try to do anything like uniting people. He tried to divide people.

This New York magazine story begins, "On Bill Clinton's desk at his Harlem office, there are nearly 100 missing flyers, sorrowful mementos of his handshaking visits to ground zero and to the family-crisis center. He can't bring himself to file them away, an aide says, so they sit there, a reminder of the horrendous loss of life - and of his inability to either prevent it or do much to heal the wounds."

THIS IS NOT ABOUT BUSH OR CLINTON

This is why this Bush's press conference last Thursday night gave the press such a fit. This is why this Tuesday, when I joined Bush's White House speech to children in progress, we heard such a contrast between Clinton and Bush. Because with this current president, these attacks have nothing to do with him personally. Where some would rejoice in this "opportunity," George W. Bush is pained over it. He doesn't want to be presiding over it. Yet we have story after story after story about our ex-president and his buddies lamenting the fact it didn't happen when he was in the Oval Office. Stop and think about that.

When you listen to President Bush in this clip from Tuesday, I want you to recall how so many of my conservative friends - even before the campaign when it looked like W was going to be the nominee - came to me and said he wasn't conservative enough. I want you to remember how they said, "This guy doesn't have what it takes," or that he was too this or that, or didn't understand what all the hype was about. As I said then, all your feelings (there's that word again) were based on the fact that you were angry at Bush 41 for the no-new-taxes pledge.

At the time, I told you that I knew this George W. Bush. I told you that I'd seen him in action a bunch of times, and that I felt supremely confident with who he was. So every time you see George W. Bush speak now, you see the man that I knew - and you know what I've noticed lately? He does is something that Ronald Reagan did. I don't think he's copying Reagan. I think it's his own personality. Every day that George Bush speaks to the American people, he tells us that we're decent, good, capable people. He tells us that we can get things done when we set our minds to it - with or without the government - and that's why we're great.

George W. Bush is in no way a credit seeker or credit-monger. He's not trying to claim any of the credit for what others in the country, particularly the average people who make this country work do. Meanwhile, the first paragraph of this New York magazine article is about Clinton caring so much about these people who perished, but in the next paragraph, he's worried about how he's going to be recast as a president compared to the "Bush family dynasty."

Something here is totally and pathologically out of whack. "Right after the attacks, Clinton admitted to a friend he wished to be back in the White House, and he couldn't resist bitterly telling an ally that if the FBI had spent as much time chasing terrorists as it had investigating his behavior, perhaps things would have played out differently."

Now, the fact of the matter is, the FBI had to investigate his behavior. A special prosecutor appointed. His activity was required by law to be investigated. We could, therefore, say that Bill Clinton's behavior took resources away from the pursuit of terrorists, could we not? I think that's a good place to leave this story.