Friday, August 24, 2007

One of the accusations commonly tossed at the Bush administration is that they politicize the war on terror. Critics use every warning from the White House about elevated threat levels to claim that the administration wants to get some sort of political boost from the announcement. It reached its nadir when Madeline Albright and Teresa Kerry both claimed six weeks before the 2004 election (see update below) that Bush had Osama bin Laden locked up and would announce it as an October Surprise, the dumbest and least-realized political meme ever.

Now Hillary Clinton has decided to play the same game, with a silly analysis of who would benefit from a terrorist attack on the US...

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From a purely political point of view, the question demeans the audience to which it was asked and exposes the poser as the poseur she is. Most hilariously, she used this hypothetical to explain how she deals with negative attacks from Republicans. It's hard to get more negative -- and more foolish -- than to speculate that a terrorist attack would give the GOP an advantage, and that she's prepared to take political advantage of the situation should it arise.

It's an asinine statement. It shows what happens when Hillary gets away from her handlers and starts talking on her own. The only relation she has to her husband's political sense is her last name.

A November win by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry would put the United States at risk of another "devastating" terrorist attack, Vice President Dick Cheney told supporters Tuesday.

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Cheney told Republican supporters at a town hall meeting in Des Moines that they needed to make "the right choice" in the November 2 election.

"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said.

"And then we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us."