Clinton Speaks

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DEC. 4, 2002: WAR NEWS

If you were a Democrat, wouldn’t you just want to shake Clinton? Here’s what I’d be saying: “Hey Bill: You decided not to retaliate forcefully when Saddam Hussein tried to murder your predecessor, our 41st president. You decided that the right way to stop North Korea from getting a nuclear bomb was to lavish them with aid – and then you decided to ignore the evidence that they were cheating. You issued the rules that crippled our intelligence agencies.”* You decided that your top priority for the military was to social engineering, not fighting. You refused to take custody of bin Laden when he was offered up to you. You decided to fight terrorism by, as President Bush 43 so vividly put it, by firing million-dollar missiles at $10 empty tents and hitting a camel in the butt. And now you tell us that we lost the Congress because we’re seen as soft on national security. Ooooooooooooh.” It does make you wonder why there isn’t a word for chutzpah in Arkansan.

On the other hand: Clinton is right of course. Whatever else you say about the Big He, he is a shrewd student of American politics – much shrewder than his would-be successor John F. Kerry, who hopes to win the presidency in 2004 on the issue of faster train connections between New York and Boston. National security is the issue, and it is amazing that none of the likely Democratic candidates in 2004 except Joe Lieberman have anything worthwhile to say about it.

I have this theory about politics: when a political party offers the voters ham and eggs, and the voters say no thanks, its first instinct is to say, “OK then – how about double ham and double eggs?” It’s as if defeat liberates parties to say what they reallythink – and what the Democrats really think is that the voters are just as bored with the whole subject of national security as they are and would really prefer to drop the whole subject. It often takes two elections – and sometimes three – to teach a party to stop talking about what matters to itself and start talking about what matters to the voters. Republicans went through this dismal cycle in the 1990s; now it looks to be the Democrats’ turn.

* If you haven’t done so already, be sure to see Heather Mac Donald’s report on the impact of Clinton-era Political Correctness in the current issue of City Journal: "Why the FBI Didn't Stop 9/11." It's guaranteed to make your blood boil.

-- Anonymous, December 04, 2002


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