Scrapbook
Scrapbook Wesley Clark's Imaginary Friend Does Wesley Clark have an imaginary friend? The retired NATO commander and possible Democratic presidential candidate has been muttering darkly for...
...Version Two: Clark replied, "It came from many different sources, Sean...
...I got a call on 9/11...
...Sure, Democrats are mad the U.S...
...Even worse for Republicans, had Gore been running in 2000 as the incumbent, he'd probably have defeated George W. Bush...
...CLARK: "I'm not going to go into those sources...
...This is state-sponsored terrorism...
...To block a Republican redistricting bill, Democrats fled the state to prevent a vote in the legislature...
...We're talking about someone who urged the former supreme allied commander of NATO to go on national TV on 9/11 and assert a provocative untruth...
...Most independent surveys have concluded Bush would probably have won under any reasonable statewide recount in Florida...
...Version One: On Meet the Press on June 15 of this year, Clark asserted that intelligence about the Iraqi threat had been hyped...
...11 trying to use 9/11 to go after Saddam Hussein...
...That leaves the question of the call...
...Gen...
...He's the man who "guaranteed" last year that Jeb Bush wouldn't be reelected governor of Florida (Bush won by 13 points...
...Hyped by whom...
...Clark maintains that he received a call at home the afternoon of September 11, 2001, urging him to say on CNN that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were connected to Iraq...
...Speaking of California THE DAILY STANDARD's special correspondent Bill Whalen—a fellow at the Hoover Institution—will be providing regular (and excellent, if we may say so) coverage of the recall campaign at weeklystandard.com...
...Impeachment...
...New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also understood that Clark was playing with live political ammunition, and he wrote a July 15 column attacking the White House and headlined, "Pattern of Corruption...
...I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You've got to say this is connected...
...That was an astonishing accusation of corruption in the White House, and unsurprisingly it caught the eye of several astute observers...
...He supported campaign finance reform, then set out to circumvent it...
...This is not someone he called for information...
...All statewide elected offices are held by Republicans...
...He called me on 9/11...
...What conceivable reason can Clark have for protecting this joker...
...Democrats naturally want to hold this advantage, though it's unrepresentative and undemocratic...
...Both houses of the state legislature are Republican-controlled...
...Now he's waxing insanely optimistic about 2004: Recently, as he left a building near Capitol Hill, McAuliffe spotted a Fox News correspondent and shouted, "Bush is gone...
...This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But—I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence...
...But what about the 2000 race...
...11 to Saddam Hussein," Clark wrote to the Times...
...And even if impeachment had succeeded in ousting Clinton, Al Gore would have succeeded him...
...Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept...
...Much as he wants to put a sinister spin on the matter, all Clark is saying is that the White House was more sensitive to the Iraqi threat after 9/11...
...In other words, and let's have a show of hands here: How many of you believe Gen...
...Last week, rather belatedly, the New York Times published a July 18 letter from Clark purporting to "correct" the record...
...I received a call from a Middle East think tank outside the country, asking me to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein...
...This is someone who called him —who wanted to use Clark—to plant a phony story...
...CLARK: "I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror...
...Then there's Texas, now an overwhelmingly Republican state...
...And these were people who had— Middle East think tanks and people like this, and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made...
...Version Three: "I would like to correct any possible misunderstanding of my remarks on 'Meet the Press' quoted in Paul Krugman's July 15 column, about 'people around the White House' seeking to link Sept...
...But McAuliffe is pushing a new conspiracy theory that deserves scrutiny...
...Sean Hannity followed up two weeks later on Fox's Hannity and Colmes: Referring to the Russert transcript above, Hannity said of the call, "I think you owe it to the American people to tell us who...
...In other words, there were many people, inside and outside the government, who tried to link Saddam Hussein to Sept...
...HANNITY: "Who...
...In a nutshell: The Clinton impeachment, the 2000 presidential election, Texas reapportionment, and the California recall are part of a "pattern," says McAuliffe—a pattern of Republicans' undermining democracy...
...It came from all over...
...Who in the White House...
...11 from 'people around the White House' urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein," wrote Krugman...
...Good work, Terry...
...HANNITY: "That's not the answer...
...Supreme Court decided the outcome...
...It's true that journalists protect sources all the time...
...It's the decline of the Democratic party on his watch...
...And why is this grossly irresponsible "fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank" privy to "inside intelligence information...
...If you read version three carefully, you will see that Clark has now exonerated the White House of his most serious accusation...
...That turned out to be a political loser for Republicans...
...Finally, California...
...Who did that...
...We're not talking about a normal journalist-source relationship here...
...But Clark has now provided three versions of this story, and they don't add up...
...A new poll by Mark penn, a Democratic pollster, finds public identification with the party at its lowest point since before the New Deal...
...The retired NATO commander and possible Democratic presidential candidate has been muttering darkly for several months that opportunists in the White House seized September 11 as a pretext to take out Saddam Hussein...
...Terry McAuliffe, Mythmaker Normally, The Scrapbook wouldn't bother to parse the statements of Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe...
...Who's undermining democracy...
...Clark really got that call...
...But there are also times when a source deserves to be burned, and this is one of them...
...You would think Clark has a positive duty to expose the man...
...But that assumes he exists...
...House delegation, which is 17-15 Democratic as a result of a Democratic gerrymander in 1991...
...RUSSERT: "By who...
...CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House...
...They wanted the low-wattage Florida Supremes to make the call...
...Well, let's go to the videotape...
...The only exception is the U.S...
...Now, 1.6 million voters— Republicans and Democrats—have signed petitions for a recall of Democratic governor Gray Davis...
...In the 1960s, Democrats failed to get a recall of then-governor Ronald Reagan on the ballot...
...Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein...
...The recall provision was put in the state constitution in 1911 by progressives, the liberals of the day...
...Subsequently, I learned that there was much discussion inside the administration in the days immediately after Sept...
...It was for use should special interests grow too influential with officials in Sacramento...
...But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection...
...This is democracy at its grass-roots finest, with more elections and more accountability...
...CLARK : "And I personally got a call from a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information...
...asked moderator Tim Russert...
...Today they have, especially the government employees' unions...
...McAuliffe has a problem, but it's not a Republican conspiracy...
...No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept...
Vol. 8 • August 2003 • No. 47
