Neil A. Lewis, in the NYT (March 31, 2004), writing about the history of executive privilege:

A study published in 2002 by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, cited 20 instances since World War II in which presidents, waiving the privilege, had allowed senior White House aides to testify before Congressional committees.

In the case of Ms. Rice, however, the White House said no other incumbent national security adviser had ever testified in public concerning policy matters.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter did allow his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss efforts by the president's brother, Billy, to lobby on behalf of Libya. But that proceeding was considered something akin to a criminal investigation.

Some members of the Sept. 11 commission have noted that in 1994, President Bill Clinton allowed Samuel R. Berger, then his deputy national security adviser, to testify about American policy in Haiti. But Alberto R. Gonzales, the Bush White House counsel, pointed out in a letter to the commission last week that Mr. Berger's appearance had been in closed session.

In a letter on Tuesday in which the administration agreed to make Ms. Rice available for public testimony, Mr. Gonzales said the White House was making an"extraordinary accommodation" that"does not set any precedent."

One authority on executive privilege, Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University, disagreed. Professor Shane said that if anything, Ms. Rice's testimony would bolster the idea that there is no impediment to having the national security adviser testify publicly.

"If the argument is that such testimony will damage the presidency and she goes ahead and testifies and the presidency remains undamaged," he said, that only makes it more difficult to resist the next time.

Robert Scheer, in the LAT (March 30, 2004):

"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon,"This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they"have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."

Dean knows what he's talking about. He was the one who dared tell Nixon in 1973 that the web of lies surrounding the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters had formed"a cancer on the presidency." When Dean went public about that conversation, the Nixon White House smeared him as a liar. Fortunately, the conversation had been taped, and Dean was vindicated.

The dark side of the current White House was on full display last week when top officials of the Bush administration took to the airwaves to destroy the credibility of a man who had honorably served presidents Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes.

The character assassination of Richard Clarke, the former White House anti-terrorism chief, was far more worrisome than Nixon's smears of Dean because it concerned not petty crime in pursuit of partisan political ambition but rather the attempt to deceive the nation and the world as to the causes of the 9/11 assault upon our national security — and to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.

First, Bush's aides suggested that Clarke had invented the meeting in which Clarke said the president pressured him to find a link between the 9/11 attack and Iraq, ignoring Clarke's insistence that intelligence agencies had concluded that no such link existed. But on Sunday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was forced to admit that Bush had pressed Clarke on an Iraq connection. This backed up earlier assertions by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as to Bush's obsession with Iraq from the very first days of his administration at the expense of focusing on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

That the Bush lies didn't work this time may be because just too many veterans of the U.S. intelligence community are finding their voices and are willing to denounce an administration that has seriously undermined the nation's security.

They are speaking out, as 23 former CIA and other defense intelligence agents did in Robert Greenwald's devastating documentary,"Uncovered." They have stepped forward, as did David Kay, Bush's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

This is an administration that has been dominated by the neoconservative ideologues who condemned the logical restraint of the first Bush administration on foreign policy as a betrayal of the national interest.

ACCEPTING responsibility is an essential part of everyday life, something every parent and child, every boss and worker, every friend and colleague wrestle with, or know they should. But for a president it is quite rare, and at least in the view of some historians and government experts, getting rarer, as a national culture of shifting blame permeates American politics.

So it was last week that some powerful words were spoken to the spouses and families of those who died two and a half years ago in the terror of Sept. 11.

"Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you." The words of apology were unmistakable, but the face was hard to place. It belonged to none of the recognizable leaders of the government -- not President Bush or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell or Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. Here was a middle-aged man with disappearing white hair and an American flag pinned in his left lapel: a former middle-level foreign policy official of three presidential administrations named Richard A. Clarke...

Did the Bush people lack confidence in his ability? Not really; after all, on the terrible day of 9/11, Condoleezza Rice, Clarke's boss, instructed Clarke to run the crisis-management operation in the White House Situation Room while she chose to hunker down in a secure bomb shelter...

...It is one thing for a deputy at the National Security Council to accept blame on behalf of not one but several administrations, an act perched between admirable and presumptuous. But it is quite something else for a president of the United States to say he is sorry.

In October 1983, terrorists in Lebanon drove a truckload of explosives into a building housing American marines, killing 241. That December, a Defense Department commission prepared to release a report castigating officers in the chain of command for failing to safeguard their troops.

A copy was sent to President Reagan before its release. He read through it, David R. Gergen, then an aide, recalled, and with little discussion headed for the press room."If there is to be blame," Mr. Reagan said before the assembled corps,"it properly rests here in this office and with this president. And I accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good."

The commanders, Mr. Reagan said, should not be punished"for not fully comprehending the nature of today's terrorist threat."

There was some criticism at the time that Mr. Reagan had pre-empted the military disciplinary process. But over all, Mr. Gergen said, the acceptance of responsibility for something that happened during his term vastly improved Mr. Reagan's status with the military and strengthened him for the rest of his presidency...

...Of course, accepting responsibility, let alone blame, for the events of Sept. 11 is on a scale different from virtually anything else a modern president has had to deal with. Certainly, an argument could be made that Sept. 11 is more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to Beirut, and Franklin D. Roosevelt never accepted responsibility for that sneak attack. Indeed, he talked the Republicans out of making it an issue in the 1944 campaign, saying it would hurt the war effort.

Within hours after the World Trade Center towers crumbled, Bush and Clinton partisans began blaming each other for the failure to stop Al Qaeda, and have been doing so ever since in any venue they can find.

The record is actually surprisingly clear, that there was a series of moments stretching back from Sept. 11 across at least eight years when more aggressive actions might have produced a different outcome that crisp, blue morning. For example:

In 1997 a commission led by Vice President Al Gore recommended steps to tighten airline security, including tougher screening of passengers and stronger locks on cockpit doors. Civil libertarians and the airline industry resisted...

...The most famous presidential keepsake in American history is arguably a 2 1/2-by-13-inch glass sign made at the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Okla. On one side, the side that faced the president, it said,"I'm from Missouri." The other side, the side that faced visitors to the Oval Office, said,"The Buck Stops Here."

To Harry S. Truman that meant accepting responsibility for making tough decisions, including firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But it did not necessarily mean expressing regret for them later. He was proud of saying he never lost sleep over his decision to drop the atom bomb, and 10 years later when he was invited to Japan he said he would go only if he did not have to kiss the posterior portion of any Japanese citizen's anatomy. (He didn't go.)

Mr. Bush made it clear last week that he was more in the Roosevelt than the Reagan mode of the responsible commander in chief, offering a narrow test of presidential responsibility in the Sept. 11 context.

"Had I known," President Bush said the day after Mr. Clarke's testimony,"that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people."

It is hard to imagine that anyone -- even Mr. Bush's fiercest critics -- doubts that.

But Mr. Bush's statement illustrates the transition from a political culture where accepting responsibility demonstrated strength to one in which it exposes weaknesses.

Compare the actions of another young president faced with a crisis early in his administration. It was mid-April 1961, and a C.I.A.-organized invasion of Cuba had collapsed at a place called the Bay of Pigs.

"There is an old saying," President John F. Kennedy said,"that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." The president added,"I'm the responsible officer of the government."

Despite the debacle, Mr. Kennedy's popularity increased.

But statesmanship is not always everything it seems, said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. Even as Kennedy was taking responsibility, his aides were out quietly -- on background as they say in Washington -- blaming the fiasco on Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had set the invasion in motion. Eventually, one Kennedy administration official, Stuart L. Udall, blamed Eisenhower in public, which brought a fierce rebuttal from his vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and forced the White House to retreat. President Kennedy, his spokesman, Pierre E. Salinger, said, bears sole responsibility and wanted everyone to know it.

In those days, a leader took responsibility in public and his aides spread the blame only in private. Today, those aides spread the blame on cable TV and only former mid-level officials take responsibility. In the culture of today's politics, presidents may well be afraid to admit they can't make everything perfect.

The grave of Senator Joe McCarthy has been pillaged. In the think tanks of the Republican right, in the broadcasts of Fox News, and in the pages of some of the most popular books in America, he lives again. From the mid-1950s until 2001, there was a consensus in America that McCarthyism was a brief period of political psychosis. The Senator's drunken belief that the democratic American left consisted mainly of closet Reds working to subvert the United States was seen as risible; a sulphuric firework that threatened American civil liberties and democracy for a moment but then deservedly died away.

No longer. The fourth best-selling book in the US last year - Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism - was an explicit apologia for McCarthy."What this country needed in the 1950s was Joe McCarthy," she says."Amid all the mandatory condemnations of Joe McCarthy, the little detail about his being right always seems to get lost. His fundamental thesis was absolutely correct... He was not terrorising people purposelessly. His targets were Soviet sympathisers and Soviet spies." She describes the Hollywood blacklisting of suspected Communists as"honourable", and concludes,"McCarthy's gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion."

She is not a lone madwoman. The rehabilitation of McCarthy is currently a major theme on the US right. William Buckley Jr, the grande dame of American conservative intellectuals, has published a tedious but aggressive novel, The Redhunter, which glorifies the Senator. The historian Arthur Herman has published an acclaimed revisionist biography which says McCarthy's fears"weren't paranoid delusions. They were true." Campaigning group Accuracy in Academia recently staged a conference entitled"Rethinking McCarthy". Henry Kissinger has noted - echoing Coulter - that McCarthy"did not go far enough."

Is it possible that there was a vast Communist plot to subvert American democracy, and only McCarthy understood the depth of the problem? The new McCarthyites claim their reappraisal was triggered by new evidence: the declassification of a series of documents from the Soviet archives known as the Verona cables. These documents do indeed show that some of the individuals defended by the 1950s left and savaged by McCarthy were actually Soviet spies. The most prominent is the left's old cause celebre, Alger Hiss.

This is a serious blow, and it should be honestly acknowledged. A minority of people on the left are still inclined to see 1950s Stalinists as misguided idealists, decent believers in equality and liberty who somehow went astray. This is unsustainable. By the time Hiss was offering his secrets to Stalin's agents, the news about the gulags - vast concentration camps which slaughtered over 15 million innocent people - was out and beyond dispute. The US has many flaws, but it is lunatic to believe it is domestically equivalent to this; there are no mass graves in Kansas.

Too much of the left for too long implied there was moral equivalence between the two sides in the Cold War. They're wrong: the defence of a basically free society is not the same as the defence of a totalitarian state. A society where minorities can organise and fight for recognition is not the same as a society where minorities are herded up and executed. Hiss was not swapping secrets between two equally bad tribes.

But it's a wild leap to say that these cables therefore vindicate McCarthy. A handful of his allegations have turned out to have been right. A handful of Mystic Meg's predictions no doubt end up being accurate too. McCarthy made so many accusations - with virtually no evidence - that it would be extraordinary if he did not hit the target a few times.

More than this, it is a blatant distortion of the historical record to claim that only McCarthy was opposed to Communist spies. Most of the democratic left saw the menace of Stalinism and the crucial importance of defending America's imperfect democracy. If anything, McCarthy damaged the cause of anti-Communism by associating it with paranoid madness.

Some people will see this as an arcane historical debate. They are wrong. The Verona cables were decoded in 1995, but they have only been vigorously debated since 11 September 2001. There's a reason: at the start of a long war against Islamic fundamentalism, Americans are thinking about the launch of their last long war. How McCarthy is viewed provides us with an indication of how the"War on Terror" will proceed.

If the errors of the early stages of the Cold War are not acknowledged now, they will be repeated. The history of the 1950s is a must-read today. The first lesson is clear: within America, dissent must be defended vigorously from Coulter-style charges of treachery. The way to defend democracy is not to shut it down but to embrace it. Public debate and a frank analysis of American mistakes will make the battle against Islamic fundamentalism more efficient, not less.

In particular, it will help us to distinguish between when the US acts in a legitimate war against Islamic fundamentalism, and when it uses this as a pretext aggressively to extend its own business interests. This blurring went on throughout the Cold War: uppity democracies trying to fend off US business exploitation, like Guatemala, were crushed in the name of the war on communism. The neo-McCarthyites must not be allowed to silence opponents of aggressive US businesses with a howl of"Treachery!" It is one thing to die fighting Stalinism or Bin Laden; it is another to kill for the United Fruit Company or Halliburton.

The second lesson is that to oppose Islamic fundamentalism, Americans must repudiate their own far right. A Cold War in which America was led by McCarthy and his acolytes might not have been winnable at all. An America that jailed people for their political beliefs or that launched"limited nuclear wars" (another McCarthy obsession) might have been an America that collapsed under its own lunacies before the Soviet Union did. The US side in the Cold War was at its weakest - and its most morally indefensible - when it was fought by the President politically closest to McCarthy: Richard Nixon.

The third lesson is that the US and Britain should not back the far right abroad - foreign McCarthys - in the mistaken belief that they will help us to prevail. The Cold War led the US to overthrow many decent democratic regimes that it feared were pro-Soviet (or simply found economically inconvenient): Salvador Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran. This damaged the American cause by making it - in foreign policy terms - for a time as totalitarian as the Soviet Union.

The same mistake may be repeated today. If the US continues to back fascistic dictatorships like the House of Saud, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and now Colonel Gaddafi, in the mistaken belief that they will help us in the"War on Terror", then the US will continue to haemorrhage its moral superiority over Islamic fundamentalists. The best way to defend democracy is to spread democracy, not supress it in the interests of fair-weather friends.

The corpse of Joe McCarthy is being paraded before us. The more extreme wing of the US right believe he offers us a model for how to fight a war against Islamic fundamentalism. They're right - and it's a model that leads straight to liquidated democracy and defeat.

John D. Podesta and Judd C. Legum, in Salon (March 22, 2004):

Every time our nation faces a threat to national security there is a powerful tension between the need to keep the people informed and the need to keep the enemy in the dark....

On July 20, 1916, a group of German saboteurs blew up a large munitions dump on the New York Harbor, creating what the New York Times later described as"a colossal, ear-splitting, ground-shaking, glass-breaking explosion" that could be heard as far away as Maryland. Shrapnel pierced the Statue of Liberty. Thus, terrorism was an issue of great national concern nearly 90 years ago.

The attack on the New York Harbor and, more broadly, the beginning of the United States involvement in World War I marked the birth of the modern secrecy movement. During the first days of World War I, the Army implemented the first modern information-classification system. And just weeks after the United States entered the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it unlawful to disseminate information relating to the broad categories of"national defense" or"public defense."

In October 1917, Theodore Roosevelt expressed the prevalent attitude of the day:"The men who oppose the war; who fail to support the government in every measure which really tends to the efficient prosecution of the war; and above all who in any shape or way champion the cause and the actions of Germany, show themselves to be the Huns within our own gates and the allies of men whom our sons and brothers are crossing the ocean to fight."

Attorney General John Ashcroft, in an eerie echo of Roosevelt's comment, made it clear that the"Huns within" syndrome is alive and well. Testifying in support of the USA PATRIOT Act, a law which significantly expanded the ability of the government to act in secret, Ashcroft infamously said:"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

It has always been this combination of the fear of the enemy as well as the fear of disloyalty -- what Roosevelt referred to as the"Huns within" -- that has been the rationale for withholding government information from the American public. As apprehension of subversives rises, so does the scope of government secrecy.

The lesson of the Cold War
Secrecy became more formalized and pervasive during the Cold War. The Soviet Union heightened anxieties of external attack, domestic infiltration and espionage. Communists and"fellow travelers" became the new"Hun within."

As fears of the Communism increased, the executive branch expanded the role of the intelligence communities, continually placing more of the government's operations under a shroud of secrecy. Stunningly, by 1957, the epidemic of over-classification was acknowledged by the government. That year a presidential Commission on Government Security concluded that a"vast, intricate, confusing and costly complex of temporary, inadequate, uncoordinated programs and measures designed to protect secrets and installations vital to the defense of the National against agents of Soviet imperialism" had grown unrestrained. But the commission's advice to reduce and control that system went unheeded. That same system, although somewhat narrowed or expanded by succeeding presidents, underpins our classification system today.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 demonstrated the unfortunate consequences of increasing reliance on government decision making performed exclusively through secret channels. The aim of the limited invasion, planned and carried out in a narrow and covert channel, was intended to spark a popular revolt against Castro. Instead the failed mission set in motion a chain of events that led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The year before the invasion, Lloyd Free, a Princeton University social scientist, conducted an extensive public-opinion survey in Cuba. The study revealed that at the time Cubans were quite optimistic about the future. Free unambiguously concluded that Cubans"are unlikely to shift their present overwhelming allegiance to Fidel Castro." Even though this public information was specifically given to the U.S. government, it was ignored. This is one of the most tragic consequences of the culture of secrecy: Crucial public information becomes devalued, easily disregarded or dismissed.

Nearly 40 years later the U.S. invasion of Iraq mirrors the problems associated with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Bush administration concluded that Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction based on information that it was provided largely in secret, even though much of this information was self-serving, secondhand or otherwise unreliable. For example, the government relied heavily on information provided to it by Ahmed Chalabi, its favorite exile who hadn't been in Iraq for decades and had a strong self-interest in precipitating a U.S. invasion.

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, transcript by Limbaugh (March 22, 2004):

RUSH: Now, I'm not going to use any video of Clarke from 60 Minutes, but he was on Good Morning, America today, and here's just a couple, maybe three sound bites. Charlie Gibson says,"So, you deal with the exigencies of the day on September 11th. You come in September 12th ready to plot what response we take to Al-Qaeda. Let me talk about the response that you got from top administration officials. On that day, what did the president say to you?"

CLARKE: Well, the president wanted us to look to see if Iraq was involved. Now, the White House is trying to say he very calmly asked me to do due diligence and see who might have done it to look at all the possibilities. That wasn't it, and the White House is also saying maybe the meeting didn't take place, and there are witnesses who have said the meeting took place. The president in a very intimidating way left us, me and my staff, with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word that there was an Iraqi hand behind 9-11, because they had been planning to do something about Iraq from before the time they came into office.

RUSH: You know, all this would really be powerful if the first thing we had done is go into Iraq. But my memory tells me, my friends, that the first thing we didn't do was go to Iraq, that we went to Afghanistan. You know, and plus, Mr. Clarke, this is an opinion. He’s indulging here in opinion, what he thinks of what the president wanted, what he thinks was on the president's mind. The president was faking him out, the president, look, I want you to come back here, I don't care what you find, it better say Iraq. Well, the president didn't get what he wanted, apparently, and so how can that be? If the president had his mind made up and wanted to see Iraq in this report, and it wasn't there, then what would we logically expect the president to do, fire the people who didn't do what he wanted to do and then launch a salvo on Iraq the next day?

By the way, you know, folks, I want to take you back, if you care to traverse back to September 12th, 2001, when this first happened, who did you think it might be? Who was it that you thought it might be? I tell you what, my first thought was Saddam Hussein. Here's Bush's kid, Bush 41's son in the White House, who is still steaming over the Gulf War. That was my first thought, and a lot of other people's first thoughts as well. The administration was mum. The administration didn't say anything, and we were wondering why. We didn't know what they were thinking. This idea that Richard Clarke is sitting here on the inside, he was a holdover from the Clinton years. And it's obvious there were people keeping him at arm's length even though he was on board. The next sound bite, Richard Clarke answers Charlie's question on Good Morning, America, today. Did Bush ask about any other nations other than Iraq?

CLARKE: Oh, no, no. No. Not at all. It was Iraq, Saddam, fight find out, get back to me.

GIBSON: And were his questions more about Iraq than about Al-Qaeda?

CLARKE: Absolutely. Absolutely. He didn't ask me about Al-Qaeda. I think they had an"idee fixe," a plan from day one, that they wanted to do something about Iraq, while the World Trade Center was still smoldering, while they were still digging bodies out, the people in the White House were thinking, ah, this gives us the opportunity we've been looking for to go after Iraq.

RUSH: Yeah, while the bodies were being dug out and the World Trade Center was still smoldering the administration trying to concoct and arrange a scenario to allow them to go into Iraq no matter what? Well, the only problem here, uh, Mr. Clarke is that Bush didn't go into Iraq no matter what. Once we knew it was Al-Qaeda we went to Afghanistan, not Iraq. I mean, it's one thing for you to go out and say all this and offer these opinions but history doesn't bear him out. History doesn't bear him out. Well, he's claiming he was in on the big meetings but he obviously wasn't in on the big meetings. We'll get to that in just a second. So Gibson says,"All right, you write in the book.." And, by the way, there's no challenge to anything this guy said on 60 Minutes, there's very little challenge to what he said on Good Morning, America today. Oh, you say this, okay, well what do you say about this, what do you say about that? He wasn't challenged on much of anything. Gibson says,"You write in the book no doubt the U.S. could have brought true stability to Afghanistan with a larger force, could have made the return of the Taliban and the terrorists virtually impossible. Instead, the larger force was held back for Iraq?"

CLARKE: That's right. And to this day Afghanistan is not stable. To this day we're hunting down Osama bin Laden. We should have put U.S. special forces in immediately, not many weeks later. U.S. special forces didn't get into the area where bin Laden was for two months and we tried to have the Afghans do it. You know, basically the president botched the response to 9-11. He should have done right after Afghanistan, right after bin Laden, and then he made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq.

RUSH: You know, this is just the amazing thing. How many times had Al-Qaeda via bin Laden acted when Richard Clarke meant something in the counterterrorism force, and we never once went after bin Laden. In fact, bin Laden was offered to us at least twice from Sudan, recall? When Richard Clarke was there. And we said no, the Clinton administration said no because there are lawyers in the justice department, i.e., Janet Reno advised against it,"we don't have enough evidence to hold him" or some other concoction. All this talk, you should have done this, you should have done that - he was in the White House for nine months when all this happened, you guys were in there eight years, Mr. Clarke, with event after event after event, terrorist attack after terrorist attack after terrorist attack, and you are the ones that strengthened bin Laden by not pursuing him, by not retaliating and in fact by caving to him in Somalia.

And then there's this line again,"made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq." Oh, yeah, the terrorists really got mad then, that's going to really make 'em mad. As though we did go to Afghanistan, whether our special forces got there when he wants them there or not we did go to Afghanistan, we blew up Tora Bora, we have imprisoned terrorists of al-Qaeda down at G'itmo. What do you mean, we're going to make 'em mad? He is espousing here, espousing a recipe for not pursuing these people, because"he's only going to get mad, they're only going to get mad." I mean, let me ask you a question. During the Clinton administration was there ever a war on terrorism? Did they ever mount a war on terrorism? I don't recall one! I don't recall terrorism being a big focus of the Clinton administration.

I do recall after the embassy bombings, Madeleine Albright saying,"We're declaring war on terrorism," and that's when they launched the salvo at the aspirin factory in Sudan and the missiles at the empty terrorist camp in Afghanistan and the missiles in Baghdad and that's all they did and those events happened to coincide with key grand jury testimony of people, witnesses, in the Monica Lewinsky case, which led at an impeachment case. You know, they had a terrorism summit somewhere on some island off of Egypt somewhere, a Clinton photo op. What war on terrorism did this administration fight? I've got a piece here on Richard Clarke written a year ago -- I have to double-check where it is, it's in the stack here in just a second, but this piece is written by an expert in the field who said that Clarke when he was in the Clinton administration running around warning everybody of the dangers posed by electronic warfare and terrorism, that the Internet was going to be the focal point of it. He couldn't have been more wrong. The only war that the Clinton administration fought, ladies and gentlemen, was on Ken Starr, and now they're mounting a war on George W. Bush as they seek to protect their own keisters. That would be rear ends for those of you in Rio Linda.