My favorite political quote:

[Flabbergasted]

(This is almost ten years old....It's rich with satire.....)


"Never underestimate a desperate president," said Rep. Harold Solomon, (R-NY)



'Wag the Dog' Haunts Clinton

17 December, 1998

By Bruce Sullivan
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) – A substantial percentage of Americans are skeptical of President Clinton's motives in launching the latest attack on Iraq. An ABC News poll, taken soon after the military operation began, said that 30 percent of those polled thought the President timed the attack to delay his impeachment vote in the House.

The last time President Clinton launched air strikes on Iraq, Monica Lewinsky's name was just beginning to become a household word. The comparisons to that attack last winter with the movie "Wag the Dog," in which a president wages a fake war to divert attention from a sex scandal, were inevitable, but ultimately speculative, and only came from unofficial sources, not Congress.

Now, Lewinsky is probably more famous than Michael Jackson, and Bill Clinton's eleventh-hour bombing of Baghdad, just before a probable impeachment by the House, has some Members of Congress questioning the President's motives in violation of an unwritten code that says you don't criticize the Commander-in-Chief during wartime.

"Never underestimate a desperate president," said Rep. Harold Solomon, (R-NY)

Solomon, who is retiring at the end of the year, said Clinton's only way of postponing his impeachment and getting it "off the front page" was the air strike on Iraq.

Even Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) publicly questioned the President's motives. "Both the timing and the motive are subject to question," he said.

House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston (R-LA) was a bit more diplomatic in saying that he supported "the troops" while pointedly failing to say that he supported the President.

Retired general Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the troops in the 1990 Desert Storm operation, admonished politicians not to criticize Clinton's actions or motives.

"By golly, troops are committed, and we can't have people second-guessing the way they did in Vietnam."

Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that many Republican senators, including Sens. Helms (NC), McCain (AZ) and Lugar (IN) have supported the President and not questioned his reasons for the attack.


http://www.cnsnews.com/indepth/archive/199812/IND19981217g.html

[Ian David]

1. Wag the Dog! No war for Jeff Gannon! n/t