Excerpt:
Hang on, say the Dems, Bush only wants a war because it’s an election year. As Dick Cheney pointed out, ‘Every other year is an election year and you can’t take half the calendar and put it off-limits.’ But I’m sure even now the New York Times is commissioning Arthur Schlesinger Jr or some other venerable Ivy League Democrat flack to pen a learned essay arguing that the precedents of America’s entries into the first and second world wars suggest that it would be grossly unconstitutional to go into battle in an even-numbered year.
But, if that doesn’t stick, some congressional Democrats are saying they won’t be able to make a decision about Iraq until they hear what the United Nations thinks. The President had fun with that one: ‘It seems to me that if you’re representing the United States, you ought to be making a decision on what’s best for the United States,’ he said last Friday. ‘If I were running for office, I’m not sure how I’d explain to the American people saying, “Vote for me, and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I’m going to wait for somebody else to act.”’
Okay, if delegating your responsibilities to Kofi Annan won’t fly, it’s time to fall back on a sure-fire favourite. ‘There was nothing new in President Bush’s speech today to the United Nations General Assembly,’ wrote William Saletan in Slate. ‘There was no compelling new evidence,’ wrote Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. Where have I heard that before? Oh, right: 1998/1999, the standard Clintonite’s defence of the impeachment era. ‘There’s nothing new here. We’ve heard it all before’ works well enough when it’s interns, cigars and semen, but it doesn’t play quite so well with chemical weapons facilities and nuclear capability. It’s true that much of what Bush says could have been said four years ago. In fact, President Clinton did say it four years ago. The difference is he didn’t want to do anything about it.
Meanwhile, every ten minutes or so, the funereal Senator Daschle pops up on TV and announces gloomily that he still has ‘a number of questions’ about Iraq that the President needs to answer. It must be quite a number, because, no matter how many answers the President gives, for Daschle there are always ‘a number of questions that still remain’. Actually, the only remaining question is how much longer the Democrats’ most visible spokesman can afford to go on making himself look like a total idiot. What question does he still need answered? ‘What’s the capital of Iraq?’? Daschle fancies himself presidential material. If so, he’s supposed to have answers, not just endless unspecified questions.
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