The war of words between the Bush administration and the Clintons intensified on Tuesday as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that her husband would have reacted differently as president if he had heard the same warnings about Osama bin Laden’s plans that President Bush had access to before 9/11.
In unusually blunt terms, Senator Clinton questioned the current administration’s response to an intelligence briefing President Bush received about a month before the 9/11 attacks. It mentioned that Al Qaeda was intent on striking the United States using hijacked planes.
“I’m certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’ he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team,” she said during an appearance on Capitol Hill.
The comments by Senator Clinton ratcheted up an already bitter exchange of charges between the Bush and Clinton camps over how the two administrations responded to the threat posed by Al Qaeda before the attacks, which occurred nearly eight months into the Bush presidency.
In her remarks, Senator Clinton also suggested that Bill Clinton’s animated defense of his own national security record as president, delivered only a few days earlier, provided a powerful example for Democrats, whom Republicans have sought to portray in recent national elections as too weak to lead the country in such perilous times.
“I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks,” she said.
[...]
“President Clinton saw the warnings and took action,’’ [Hillary's spokesperson] Mr. Reines said. “President Bush saw the warnings and took no action.’’
For Senator Clinton, who is considered a possible contender for the presidency in 2008, her comments on Tuesday were unusually personal in tone. But Howard Wolfson, one of her chief advisers, made it clear that Senator Clinton would be taking an increasingly aggressive posture to thwart any Republican attempts to cast Democrats as timid on national defense this election season.
“She is not going to allow her party, her husband or herself to get Swift-boated,” he said, referring to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that attacked the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry when he was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2004. “Democrats have to stand up and go toe to toe with Republicans on national security.”
You betcha. Y'all bring it on now and more of it. And while you at it, don't forget wacky doodle Falwell needs to apologize. He wasn't respectful of Hillary or of women by implying the ol' women are evil and the reason for original sin routine. Unconscious patriarchal puke. Bleh!
NOTE: Image of Hillary Clinton
is from her book, Living History,
available at Amazon.com. Worth reading.
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