Television footage of the only man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Gadhafi's government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader's war with the Western world?

So terrorism was Gadhafi's "signature," and many "nations" hope a full accounting will be forthcoming. What's the record that Burns has put together?

Obviously he talks about Pan Am 103, which is the most visible example. But there are serious questions about the link between Libya and the Lockerbie bombing. Burns mentions the 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing, which killed three people. The judge at the 2001 trial said the  Libyan government bore some responsibility, but a connection to Gadhafi could not be established. The Times account of the trial mentioned in passing that prosecutors alleged that the disco bombing was launched  "to retaliate against the sinking of two Libyan boats by the United States in the Gulf of Sirte." It's unlikely that many people remember these acts, which likely killed a fair number of Libyans.

The other examples Burns cites are support for the Irish Republican Army--similar schemes were undertaken around the world, including here in the United States--a shooting outside a British embassy that killed a police officer and the disappearance of a religious leader in Lebanon during a visit to Libya.

This is not to suggest that Gadhafi was innocent of any of these charges. His rule in Libya was marked by vicious attacks and repression inside the country.

But it's difficult to imagine someone at the Times writing about international hunger for accountability for terrorist acts supported, linked to or committed by George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. It's not as if it would be difficult to point to their "signature" acts--support for deadly, anti-democratic death squads in Latin America, the massive destruction and violence unleashed on Iraq, or the torture and prisoner deaths that occurred on Bush's watch. But something tells that if you were to to try to write about these "signature" acts of American terrorism in connection to either--or even to Henry Kissinger's record--someone at the New York Times might try to have you committed.

RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion?

DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No.

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don't know if we want to open that door.

Let that serve as a reminder to read Neil deMause's piece from the last issue of Extra!

This was a laugh line, so I guess take it for what it's worth.  On the other hand, Cokie Roberts seemed to be serious when she said this about George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina:

It was surprising to me, his reaction, because his father's example with Hurricane Andrew had been such that you would think that he would, you know, understand that he needed to get out front on Katrina. But in his case, a huge part of his appeal post September 11th, was that he was keeping the country safe. And suddenly, people didn't feel safe. They weren't safe. They were in a very dangerous situation.

Back in reality, Bush's job approval rating was hovering around 50 percent for about 18 months prior to Katrina--which would suggest quite a number of people weren't sure about Bush's "appeal" before that storm hit. More jarring, though, is to hear someone say that people liked Bush after the 9/11 attacks because "he was keeping the country safe." Really?

demanding more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? Unbelievable.

People like Bill O'Reilly don't pay any mind to the fancy pants Nobel Prize committee that gave Krugman one of their liberal awards. Why should he? He knows how the economy really works, as he explained last night (8/8/11):

Raising income taxes is not the way out of this. In 2001 and again in 2003, President Bush cut individual tax rates. And what happened? Well, from 2004 until 2008, tax revenue increased from about $800 billion to almost $1.2 trillion. That blows away the liberal argument that tax cuts starve the government of revenue. They don't.

This has been, at times, a talking point among conservatives. But you don't really get a sense of tax revenue without comparing it to something-- as FactCheck.org noted in a piece in 2007 (when John McCain was saying much the same about the Bush tax cuts), revenues tend to increase every year as the economy grows.

A more useful measure would be how tax revenue looks relative to the size of the economy. As the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent report (6/1/11) on the 10-year anniversary of the Bush cuts:

• Federal tax revenue fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in FY2000 (the last year of the 1991-2000 expansion and reflective of
Clinton-era tax rates) to 18.5 percent of GDP in FY2007 (the last year of the Bush economic expansion and reflective of
Bush-era tax rates).

• From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, nearly 50 percent of the total debt accrued
during this period.

• The decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous
decade since the 1950s.

That would be (part of) the "liberal argument" against the Bush tax cuts--and it doesn't appear to be "blown away" by O'Reilly's too-good-for-Princeton economic analysis.

After Bolling's error, erasing 9/11 and several other deadly terrorism attacks from the Bush record, was pointed out by outlets including Media Matters and Huffington Post, the host returned to the air Thursday to issue a correction that sounded more like a retaliation against those who dared correct him. Bolling denounced the  "radical liberal left" and accused Media Matters of pettiness for pointing out the error, in an emotional tirade in which he exclaimed:

No, I haven't forgotten. I happened to be standing there, watching in true terror as radical Islamists slammed planes into the towers that morning. I remember the towers collapsing, killing 3,000, including 16 of my close friends. And I really remember trying to comfort the kids of my friends at their memorial services.

Bolling's temporary amnesia about the September 11 attacks puts him in company with many conservatives who have distorted the Bush record on terrorism  (Extra!, 3/10). But even the correction part of Bolling's tirade was in error:

Yesterday I misspoke when I said there were no U.S. terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11.

Among the terror attacks Bolling's revised position erases from the Bush record: the  September/October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five, the December 2001 "shoe bombing" attempt, the July 2002 attack on the L.A. airport's El Al ticket counter that left two dead, the "D.C. sniper" attacks in October 2002 that killed 10,  the  March 2006 SUV attack on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus that injured nine and the July 2008 murder of two at a progressive Knoxville, Tennessee church, which were carried out by a gunmen who said he was inspired by Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg.

According to the Huffington Post, none of the panelists on the show challenged Bolling's initial error about 9/11. But should we be surprised? Among those panelists was former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino, who is on the record insisting to an unfazed Sean Hannity, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."