Responsibility

If anything is missing in this society, it is the willingness to accept responsibility. Currently, former President Bill Clinton is organizing a campaign against the Bush administration regarding who did more to capture Osama bin Laden. At this point, I have to ask, who cares who did more than who? bin Laden is still at large, and that's the problem we need to focus on. Or at least one among many. What many people forget is that, while at times it is necessary to apportion blame in order to teach and correct, we cannot change the past. We cannot, by blaming others--even if that blame is justified--make the present situation vanish. We can only start from now and work forward.

What President Clinton needs to do is simply say, "I did not catch bin Laden, so he's still at large and we need to go after him. End of story." If there's trust at stake here, then that trust has already been lost by failing to capture bin Laden. If trust needs to be regained, then all President Clinton can do now is work to rebuild that trust. Instead we see him playing a blame game with President Bush (who also has had plenty of failings, don't get me wrong), and the only reason to do something like that is the childish "well, what I did wasn't as bad as what Joey did", trying to make one's fault less by comparing it with someone else's fault.

Here's the point. If I steal a hundred dollars from someone, and then point at all the bank robbers and car thieves who steal by far more than I did, I am still culpable for stealing a hundred dollars. The comparison with other crimes does not alleviate my guilt. Granted, I should not be punished as though I committed grand theft auto, but I am still deserving of punishment. President Clinton needs to stop playing these games with public opinion, stop trying to pull "less corrupt than thou", and move on.

And while he's considering that, we also need to move on. So he didn't catch bin Laden. So what? Tarring and feathering him on Fox News is not miraculously going to catch bin Laden. If we feel that President Clinton's failure is grave fault for a United States president, then all we can do now is put the pressure on President Bush to fix the problems that prevented bin Laden's capture and make good on his promise to fight the War on Terror.