I will leave most of the sage words and research to Joe Conason at Salon, but this meme that Bill Clinton is really to blame for 9/11 just won’t seem to go away:

The list of Clinton’s actions against terrorism and specifically against al-Qaida is long; the list of his efforts to prepare domestically against a terrorist attack is even longer. He and his aides tried to warn the incoming Bush administration about al-Qaida’s plans to attack the United States, but they were brushed aside, as were the study group led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman; Bush’s own counterterrorism director, Richard Clarke; and CIA chief George Tenet.

As for Giuliani, what did he do after the ’93 bombing? In their reporting for “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11,” journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins went to great lengths to find out. The answer, they discovered, was that he did nothing. And he said nothing. After he was elected mayor later that year, he still did and said nothing about terrorism, a pattern of inaction and inattention that continued for years, even as the trials of the bombing perpetrators went on in his city — and even as federal investigators uncovered terrorist plots to blow up the Hudson River tunnels and other major New York City targets.

See, according to Giuliani (sorry, but the diminutive “Rudy” is saved for those who deserve it), Bill Clinton failed to do anything after the 1993 WTC bombings, and that apparently led to the 9/11 attacks (I’m paraphrasing his argument, of course).

All this does is draw attention to what Republicans were doing about terrorism in the 1990’s. From encouraging withdrawal from Somalia to mocking retaliation for the 1998 African embassy bombings (would Repubs have supported sending in troops then?), the short answer to that question is this: nothing. They were mostly concerned with blowjobs.