Jeb Bush and Sean Hannity agree: Let's blame Bill Clinton for 9/11!

We may need to inaugurate a new series, Sean Hannity is the lead paint of punditry. The Fox News "personality" was keen Monday night to take up the Fox & Friends paint can and partake of a few swigs, opining that if only President Bill Clinton had done in al Qaeda and bin Laden before handing things over to George W. Not Necessarily The Dumbest Bush, everything would have been fine and the incoming Republican wouldn't have had to worry his precious little noggin over it. Why didn't he do that, then?

After playing the clip, Hannity asked the former Florida governor: "If Bill Clinton knew he wanted to commit crimes against America and was offered him and he didn't take him, isn't that in and of itself a legal basis to take the guy?"

Hannity here is relaying the theory that Sudan "offered bin Laden on a silver platter" in the 1990s, which like much of what Sean Hannity says would be vaguely compelling if it were actually true. It's not. More to the point, Sean Hannity's claim that Bill Clinton fell down on the job of going after al Qaeda is that Sean Effing Hannity himself was, during those years, one of the conservative pundits promoting a conspiracy theory that Clinton's 1998 cruise missile attacks on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan were meant to distract America from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

On his August 20, 1998 program -- just hours after the strikes -- Hannity repeatedly asked his guests if they "see a 'Wag the Dog' scenario here." He went on to explain, "I do a radio show here in New York, and this story broke about 2:00, and I was on the air at 3:00, and every line was jammed and every person was saying the same thing, that in their minds, they're thinking the scenario is 'Wag the Dog,' divert attention away from the crisis that is going on in Washington."

That's right, top-notch conservative mind Sean Hannity was angry that Bill Clinton ordered air strikes against al Qaeda, because he was convinced Clinton was taking military action only to seem presidential while people like Sean Hannity were still busy mucking around his underwear drawers.

All right, so we know where Sean Hannity stands, which is that he'll stand anyplace you want and swear he's been there for years. Let's watch Jeb Bush, part of the long line of Bush family deep thinkers but a man who is His Own Self and not just a carbon-copy of the worst president in modern history, nod along: