i've admitted i was wrong, with caveats of course. but i'm still happy that we removed saddam from power. aren't you? Glad you admitted you were wrong. I guess this admission was about the whole wmd thing and Iraq being an imminent danger like the Stalin of your father's generation. I can agree that Sadam is a bad guy. If you ignore the cost to innocent individual Americans and , Iraqis and also the way in which the unecessary war will probably lead to increased terrorism among Americans around the world that is good he was removed. Hope you can agree that it is bad that innocent American have to die when he wasn't a real threat to the US.
I never said he was an imminent danger, rather an inevitable one. As such I don't have any problem removing him. Saddam was a bad guy. We all agree on that. He killed thousands a year. We all agree on that. If you want to do some balance testing, that is fine. In the end it certainly was worth it to remove him, at least as far as balancing 'innocent life' goes. As for future terrorism, let's not guise speculation as proof. Nope. I've always said (feel free to look it up) that removing him because he's a genocidal despot was reason enough to intervene. In fact, I always said that should have been the first justification for his removal. Maybe you want to turn your back on 'innocent' victims of despots, but I don't.
I guess we could speculate on whether Sadam would have eventually have become a threat to the United States. It is always possible. Hayes, it is so easy for you to say send other American's children to avenge Iraqi victims of Sadam. Are you in favor of sending working class kids to prevent or avenge genocide in Sudan or Ruwanda or other countires? Why don't you volunteer to interrupt your own lifestyle to take part in these activities? I believe you are young enough and able bodied enough to do so. Isn't it good to make one's actions agree with one's stated beliefs?
Absolutely, you aren't? We can send rich kids too if it makes you feel better. I'd certainly not want to join your advocacy of standing aside while genocide happens if we have the ability to stop it. That's the same kind of 'not our business' attitude that has allowed genocide to continue into this century. Whether we could operationally intervene right now in Sudan I don't have any idea, but fear not - I'm sure the 'whole world superconsensus' will take care of this problem right away, and we won't need US action. Easy to say when your 'stated beliefs' mean scuttling off to Canada. I would go if called, of that you can be sure. Unlike yourself I wouldn't turn my back on my country.
Nobody's lifestyle was inturrupted. We have an all volunteer military. Anybody that is against facing combat shouldn't be in the military in the first place. As much as Democrats like to throw it around, this isn't Vietnam, and we aren't sending over hundreds of thousands of draftees. We are sending over professional soldiers that have chosen to join the military and fight in any wars we may get involved in.
I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet... _____________________ Moore's Public Service By PAUL KRUGMAN ince it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The film's appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush's policies, should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore. There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States? And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven't been doing their job. For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes, when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that day were pure fiction. Or consider the Bush family's ties to the Saudis. The film suggests that Mr. Bush and his good friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador known to the family as Bandar Bush, have tried to cover up the extent of Saudi involvement in terrorism. This may or may not be true. But what shocks people, I think, is the fact that nobody told them about this side of Mr. Bush's life. Mr. Bush's carefully constructed persona is that of an all-American regular guy — not like his suspiciously cosmopolitan opponent, with his patrician air. The news media have cheerfully gone along with the pretense. How many stories have you seen contrasting John Kerry's upper-crusty vacation on Nantucket with Mr. Bush's down-home time at the ranch? But the reality, revealed by Mr. Moore, is that Mr. Bush has always lived in a bubble of privilege. And his family, far from consisting of regular folks with deep roots in the heartland, is deeply enmeshed, financially and personally, with foreign elites — with the Saudis in particular. Mr. Moore's greatest strength is a real empathy with working-class Americans that most journalists lack. Having stripped away Mr. Bush's common-man mask, he uses his film to make the case, in a way statistics never could, that Mr. Bush's policies favor a narrow elite at the expense of less fortunate Americans — sometimes, indeed, at the cost of their lives. In a nation where the affluent rarely serve in the military, Mr. Moore follows Marine recruiters as they trawl the malls of depressed communities, where enlistment is the only way for young men and women to escape poverty. He shows corporate executives at a lavish conference on Iraq, nibbling on canapés and exulting over the profit opportunities, then shows the terrible price paid by the soldiers creating those opportunities. The movie's moral core is a harrowing portrait of a grieving mother who encouraged her children to join the military because it was the only way they could pay for their education, and who lost her son in a war whose justification she no longer understands. Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true. For example, the film talks a lot about Unocal's plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is over, I'll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views. But not now. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was alright. Nothing really new added to the debate by it, but it's a nice compaction of reasons to personally dislike Bush. Personally, I think we can all agree that Saddam sucked. I do happen to think, however, that it was kind of stupid to go after him now, when he was a weak shell of what he used to be, after we not only turned a blind eye to his evil (and the evil of COUNTLESS dictators in Central and South America) but actively supported the guy for many years. Sure, Saddam sucked, but terrorism against the U.S. wasn't his game. His removal was a nice side product of a poorly-reasoned war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/a...200&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position= July 11, 2004 FRANK RICH Spidey Crushes 'Fahrenheit' in 2004 HE Michael Moore explosion is now officially unbearable. It's not just that you can't pick up a Time Warner magazine without seeing his mug on the cover. Or turn on a TV news show without hearing another tedious debate about the accuracy of "Fahrenheit 9/11" — conducted by the same press corps that never challenged the Bush administration's souped-up case for invading Iraq. What's most ridiculous is the central question driving the whole show: might a hit documentary swing the November election? Both political camps seem to be convincing themselves that the answer is yes. Either that, or they are overstating the movie's power to overcompensate for their worst fears. The right is sufficiently panicked about George W. Bush's slippage that it's trashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the absurd extreme of likening it to a training film for al Qaeda (according to MoveAmericaForward.org) and a defense brief for Saddam Hussein (Ann Coulter, who else?). The left is so worried about John Kerry's lackluster candidacy that it is overselling the success of "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill that vacuum, as if Mr. Moore could serve as a surrogate for the vague and charisma-challenged nominee. (That job will now fall, and not a moment too soon, to John Edwards.) "It has the potential of actually affecting the election, and if it does, it will change the world," said Rob Reiner of "Fahrenheit 9/11," echoing Eli Pariser of MoveOn, who said his members regarded the film as "the `Star Wars' " of its genre. "We literally sold out Peoria, Illinois," bragged the movie's distributor after its opening weekend. So what? Illinois is a safe Democratic state already, and even Peoria is not particularly Republican: Bush-Cheney beat Gore-Lieberman by a mere 251 votes there in 2000, fewer than the 544 votes siphoned off by Mr. Moore's candidate at the time, Ralph Nader. "The sky's the limit on this movie," Harvey Weinstein, a co-owner of the film and a prominent Democrat, told The New York Times. If so, the sky is falling. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is, as we keep being told, the most successful non-IMAX documentary of all time. What that means is that its ticket sales are whipping the bejesus out of "Winged Migration" and "Spellbound." But by any other Hollywood standard this movie, while a bona fide surprise hit (especially in relation to its tiny budget), is not a blockbuster or must-see phenomenon (except to its core constituency). Of course, it is pulling in some Republicans, and you can be sure that the sighting of each and every one will be assiduously publicized by Mr. Moore. ("There was a Republican woman in Florida unable to get out of her seat, crying," he told Time.) But with a take of $61 million by the end of its second weekend, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will have to sweat to bring in even a third of the $370 million piled up domestically by the red-state polemic to which its sectarian appeal is most frequently compared, "The Passion of the Christ." If voting at a multiplex box-office constitutes any kind of straw poll, then Mr. Bush has already won re-election. By a landslide. But he hasn't, of course. The latest actual polls show the president with an approval rating below (in some cases well below) 50 percent. The election is both too far away and too close to call. And that's why a movie like "Fahrenheit 9/11," with its relatively narrow sampling, may be no more a reliable index to the mood of the country than the Literary Digest poll of 1936. It was so skewed by the demographics of its similarly self-selected participants that it gave Alf Landon a 14-point spread over F.D.R. If you want to find a movie that might give a more accurate reading of the national pulse, it isn't hard to do: just take a look at "Spider-Man 2," which is now on a pace to outdraw Mr. Moore's film and maybe every other film this year — in every conceivable demographic. It may not be on the radar screen of the Washington pack busy misreading the electoral tea leaves of "Fahrenheit 9/11" 's box-office receipts. No one is shouting about it on Fox. But with an opening five-day take of some $152 million — next to $128 million for the most recent Shrek, $125 million for Mel Gibson's Christ, $124 million for the last Frodo, $109 million for the last Harry Potter — "Spider-Man 2" is front-and-center for most everyone else. It deserves to be on its merits, by the way. It's hard not to fall in love with "Spider-Man 2." It's not only better than any other movie based on a comic book — not the highest bar to reach — but it's also superior to all the other so-called franchise movies, in which colossal budgets, presold brand-name characters, computer-generated effects and oppressive merchandising conspire to make the product at the center of the marketing blitz often seem as disposable as that new razor concocted to sell you a new line of blades. "Spider-Man 2" is a product of that egregious process and yet it has a delicacy almost never seen any more in the big-ticket juggernauts sent our way by media conglomerates. It thrives on nuance. It's human even to the extent of replacing the standard-issue camp villain of the first "Spider-Man" movie (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin) with Alfred Molina's brooding Doc Ock. Its characters live in a real world that is recognizably America, not the landscape of a video game. Unlike the sunnier first "Spider-Man," which was released two summers ago but conceived before the terrorist attacks, the new one carries the shadow of 9/11. As the story shifts from Queens into Manhattan, the city becomes a much more vivid presence. The director, Sam Raimi, dotes on both the old (the Empire State Building in silvery mode) and the new (the Hayden Planetarium), on both the dreamily nostalgic (a fairy-book Broadway theater seemingly resurrected from an Edwardian past) and the neighborhood of our freshest wound (the canyons of Lower Manhattan). The movie is suffused with a nocturnal glow of melancholy that casts its comic-book action in an unexpectedly poignant light. The writers who set the story against this backdrop include the veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose credits go back to "Ordinary People," and the novelist Michael Chabon, who memorialized the Marvel Comics gestalt in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." They're grown-ups, as is not always the case with this kind of Hollywood product. (Mr. Sargent is in his 70's — an almost unheard-of anomaly among employed screenwriters these days.) In "Spider-Man 2," they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in "The Importance of Being Earnest." They are both watched over by Aunt May (the transcendent Rosemary Harris), whose every utterance bespeaks literature and history. This is a world worth saving, but the superhero who can save it is no Superman. He's a bookish nerd racked with guilt and self-doubt. "With great power comes great responsibility" is the central tenet of his faith, passed down not from God but from his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). He takes it seriously. Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn't want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative. He wouldn't mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can't. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York. The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year's political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of "Top Gun." There's nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare "Mission Accomplished" after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry's vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography. Whatever light "Spider-Man 2" may cast on the dueling, would-be heroes of our presidential race, however, it is not going to change the dynamic of the election any more than "Fahrenheit 9/11" will. As far as I can determine, there's only been one national election in which a single piece of moviemaking may have made some slight difference in a close campaign. That was in 1948, when Hollywood studios, eager to curry favor with Democrats who might have been offended by a previous pro-Dewey film, banded together to exhibit a 10-minute pro-Truman documentary (in the guise of a Universal newsreel) in all the nation's movie theaters. The stunt was pulled off in the last six days of the race and, with no real competition from television, reached a captive audience of some 65 million Americans at a time when the entire population was only some 146 million. Not even "Spider-Man 2" can gather a crowd that large in the fractionalized American cultural marketplace of 2004. But if it or any movie cannot move an election, its box-office triumph shows us something about those who will be doing the voting. "Spider-Man 2" is an escapist movie that serves as a rebuke to what its audience wants to escape from: a pop culture that is often too shrill and an election-year political culture that increasingly mimics that pop culture. It takes us away from cable news screamfests and toxic campaign ads no less than it delivers us from "Dodgeball." It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness. This year that appears to be the heretofore missing formula for capturing a landslide mandate in red and blue states alike.__
OK, so Spidey "crushes" Fahrenheit 9/11?? LOL! As if you can compare the box office of a documentary to the most anticipated summer blockbuster of the year. You're really reaching here, Faos. Fahrenheit is doing stunning business... no two ways about it. Rank-Weekend Total-Weeks-Screens-Weekend screen avg.-Cumulative box office 1. Spider-Man 2 (2004) $115,817,364 1 4,152 $27,894 $180,072,888 2. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) $22,027,125 (-32%) 2 1,725 $12,769 $61,118,488 3. White Chicks (2004) $11,544,456 (-56%) 2 2,800 $4,123 $46,664,718 4. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004) $11,355,165 (-57%) 3 2,950 $3,849 $87,609,589 5. Terminal, The (2004) $10,750,087 (-40%) 3 2,782 $3,864 $57,209,326 6. Notebook, The (2004) $10,362,521 (-45%) 2 2,323 $4,460 $31,674,074 7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) $8,541,177 (-47%) 5 2,725 $3,134 $225,719,716 8. Shrek 2 (2004) $8,387,681 (-43%) 7 2,609 $3,214 $410,688,506 9. Garfield (2004) $4,283,154 (-60%) 4 2,458 $1,742 $64,235,505 10. Two Brothers (2004) $3,882,180 (-56%) 2 2,181 $1,780 $12,876,545 http://us.imdb.com/boxoffice/
Faos, honestly, I'm not sure what the author of the piece is trying to accomplish. He's all over the map. I think he may be an opinion columnist frustrated at being parked in the Arts section of the Times. Here's another sample of his stuff, and one I enjoyed reading a lot more than his Spidey/Fahrenheit take... July 4, 2004 FRANK RICH Sex, Lies and No Chalabi No sooner did the epic Ronald Reagan funeral finally sputter out, leaving about as much residual trace on the national memory as the last "Matrix" sequel, than it was Bill Clinton's turn for the saturation resurrection tour. Like its immediate predecessor, the Clinton mediathon quickly proved too much of a muchness. For me, toxic shock started to set in before "My Life" officially went on sale. When Mr. Clinton and Dan Rather jointly donned rustic wear for an Arkansas summit on "60 Minutes," they seemed as authentic as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie slumming in red-state America on the Fox reality show "The Simple Life 2." On publication day 36 hours later, Mr. Clinton did "Oprah," this time in an income-appropriate power suit, set off by a natty pink tie that once again matched his interviewer's ensemble. The hour began with two separate standing ovations — one each for the host and the author. It concluded with her giving him two thumbs up. In between, the mutually assured narcissism never quit. The closest the conversation got to testy was when Oprah asked why her status as a White House visitor did not propel her onto any of the book's 957 pages. The author blamed his editor — a vast Alfred A. Knopf conspiracy. As with the Reagan farewell, pundits obsessively ask of the Clinton rollout: how will it affect the election? This is a recipe for infinite bloviation, since there is no answer. Voting day is four long months away. The more realistic question is what the re-emergence of these past presidents tells us about the country that will make that choice. The comeback kid's current comeback, even more dramatically than the weeklong siege of Reagan redux, gives us a snapshot of an America eager to wallow in any past, even the silt of Whitewater, to escape the world we live in now. It's a mood that feels less like the sunny nostalgia we imbibe on the Fourth of July than high anxiety. Better a clear-cut evil empire than an axis of evil whose members can't always be distinguished from our "allies." Better lying under oath about oral sex than dissembling with impunity about gathering "mushroom clouds" to justify the wholesale shipping of American troops into a shooting gallery. This isn't to say that the spirit of Kenneth Starr has been exorcised from public life. But it's now mutated into a parody of itself, a reliable form of national comic relief just when we need it. Even as Americans gorge on p*rn, Washington's Keystone sex Kops remain on the march. On June 22, the same day that "My Life" hit the shelves with its promise of a fresh slice of Monica, the Senate voted almost unanimously, in a rare bipartisan gesture, to increase by more than $240,000 the penalty on broadcasters who trade in "indecency." Like an outrageous coincidence in a bedroom farce, the day of this historic vote was also the one on which Vice President Cheney, visiting the Senate floor for a photo session, used a four-letter word to tell a Democratic Senator, Patrick Leahy, what he could do to himself. Mr. Cheney didn't seem to realize he had chosen the very word that had helped spur the Congressional smut crackdown in the first place — the one Bono had used at the Golden Globes last year. Has the vice president no sense of indecency? Had C-Span only caught his transgression on camera, we might have seen Brian Lamb placed under house arrest and fined on the spot. Later Mr. Cheney said he "felt better after I had done it," and of all commentators, only Jon Stewart had a theory as to why. The vice president's demand that Senator Leahy commit an act of auto-eroticism, he reasoned, may be a signal that the Republicans are belatedly endorsing the gay-friendly ethos of the Clinton administration. "I think it's them opening up their hearts to a different lifestyle," Mr. Stewart said to Larry King. In its account of the Cheney incident, The Washington Post ran the expletive verbatim — another throwback to the Clinton era. It was the first time the paper had printed this epithet since publishing the unexpurgated Starr Report in 1998. The White House didn't seem to mind. Though Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, condemned John Kerry for using this same word in a Rolling Stone interview in December — "I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language," the sorrowful Mr. Card had said — this time the transgression was given a pass. We're all moral relativists now. Surely the moral clarity promised by Mr. Clinton's successors is long gone. Much as Democrats helped push for the television V-chip while looking the other way at their president's private life, so the party of Kenneth Starr now tosses worthless family-friendly initiatives to religious conservatives while countenancing Clinton-style behavior among its own if holding on to power is at stake. You could see this dynamic in action, conveniently enough, during the same week of the "My Life" publication. President Bush was in the swing state of Ohio promoting a "healthy marriage" program to a cheering crowd just as fellow Republicans were rallying around a rumored swing voter of another sort, Jack Ryan, the party's scandal-beset senatorial candidate in Illinois. For those who missed this delightful bit of hard-core politics, here are the good parts: unsealed court documents from Mr. Ryan's custody battle with his former wife, the TV starlet Jeri Ryan ("Star Trek: Voyager"), included accusations that he had tried to coerce her into joining him in public sex at a New York club equipped with "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." Mr. Ryan, whose denomination of religiosity extends to opposing legal abortion and gay civil rights, defended himself, saying, "There's no breaking of the Ten Commandments anywhere." On The Chicago Sun-Times's Web site, coverage of this scandal carried banners touting Mr. Clinton's "My Life" as a "related advertising link." George F. Will, who wrote a column last fall extolling Mr. Ryan for his daily attendance at mass and an overall beneficence that makes "the rest of us seem like moral slackers," did not raise his voice in condemnation now. Nor did any major Republican leader, including Mr. Cheney, who had just appeared at a Ryan fund-raiser. "Jack Ryan, unlike Bill Clinton, did not commit adultery and did not lie," was how the columnist Robert Novak stood up for his man, sounding very much like Arnold Schwarzenegger's conservative apologists of last summer. Mr. Ryan, who had been regularly praised by Mr. Will and other admirers for being "Hollywood handsome," dropped out of the race anyway last week but only because he lacked Mr. Schwarzenegger's big-screen bravura (and poll numbers) to tough it out. Mr. Ryan's demise was the cue for another sex sleuth minted in the Clinton years, Matt Drudge, to seek tit for tat by trying to gin up a new Clinton-style scandal about a Democrat. A banner story on his site, unsullied by any evidence, suggested that "media outlets" might soon go to court to unseal John Kerry's divorce records just as Mr. Ryan's had been. Even if this titillating possibility hadn't been posted just as an American marine was taken hostage in Iraq, it's hard to imagine it creating the stir in 2004 it would have six years ago. An earlier attempt by Drudge to pin an intern on Mr. Kerry had also flopped, despite the efforts of the former Bush speechwriter David Frum to keep the rumor alive on The National Review's Web site until it was proved false. Such prurient fun and games, Washington style, seem like innocent escapism post-9/11. Not even Mr. Clinton's renewed omnipresence can help us revive the apocalyptic hysteria that attended the Lewinsky revelations. History is supposed to play out first as tragedy, then as farce. But this time you have to wonder if the farce, though once taken as tragedy, came first. Mr. Clinton's claim that he had "never had sexual relations with that woman" just doesn't seem as compelling as Mr. Bush's replay of the same script last month when disowning his administration's soured affair with Ahmad Chalabi. Asked if Mr. Chalabi had fed us some of the false intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that took us to war in Iraq, the president said he had never "had any extensive conversations" with that man and knew him from greeting him on a rope line (more shades of Monica!). To buy that, you have to believe that Mr. Chalabi's appearance with Laura Bush as a guest of honor at January's State of the Union is as irrelevant to this president's assertion of innocence as the stained dress was to his predecessor's. Two days after Mr. Clinton's appearance on "Oprah," Mr. Bush aped him again — becoming the first sitting president to be questioned by prosecutors at the White House since Mr. Starr was in his Whitewater heyday. Ah, Whitewater! I wonder if any of its sleazy particulars are as vivid in the public mind as the alleged crime that led the new special prosecutor to question Mr. Bush 10 days ago: the leaking of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer (to the ubiquitous Mr. Novak) by an administration official as payback for the agent's husband's criticism of Mr. Bush. Somehow wartime scandals that threaten national security, putting American lives in jeopardy, trump those of money and real estate just as they do sex. Many of Mr. Clinton's old antagonists, as we're learning since "My Life" was published, are starting to realize exactly that. "The Monica Lewinsky stuff now really seems so last century," said the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Fox as book buyers lined up for Mr. Clinton. "I mean, it just seems so old and tired and nothing new." Thus the new tactic is to update the brief to include 9/11. When Mr. Clinton appeared on "60 Minutes," the same anti-Clinton group that led the Whitewater charge a decade ago took out ads implying that it's entirely the former president's fault that al Qaeda wasn't stopped. Actually, there's more than enough blame to go around — Osama bin Laden has now gotten away during two presidencies. How the current president used semantic tricks to conflate Saddam with bin Laden, allowing him to escape yet again, is something we'd rather not think about just now. No doubt the Clinton revival will be as short-lived as Reagan's. But for the moment it takes us back to that halcyon time when we could despise a president for falsifying the meaning of a word as free of terror as "is." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/a...nted=1&n=Top/Features/Arts/Columns/Frank Rich Actually, if you read this closely, it's one hell of a slam at Bush and Clinton. Bush is sliced and diced repeatedly, as a matter of fact. I enjoyed the read.
