In 1991 the Democrats made a huge fuss over Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment of a long-time employee. Even if what was claimed actually happened, it was minor stuff and not enough to keep her from following him to different agencies. Still, feminists were outraged. The rallying cry in the 1992 election was that the men "Just didn't get it."
So where was the outrage when Clinton was accused of far worse? There was none. A few feminists actually admitted that the outrage about Thomas was a ploy to try to sink a potential anti-abortion nominee.
When Bush was first elected, Liberals had specific ideas on how Bush should act. He should admit that his administration was an Electoral mistake. He should be centrist, possibly following through on some of Gore's campaign pledges.
Bush saw things differently. As the first modern president with a Republican Congress, he took his election as a mandate.
Liberal's first ploy to limit Bush had failed so they looked to international institutions to reign in Bush. They insisted that he had to get permission from the UN, NATO, and France before engaging in any major actions.
Clinton never bothered with these institutions. He took what he could get and proceeded on. His invasion of Haiti for example had virtually no international cover. The attack on Kosovo was far more unilateral than the invasion of Iraq. Clinton even launched a major missile offensive against Iraq under the name "Desert Fox" without asking anyone. It happened at the same time as Kosovo so no one noticed.
Like Justice Thomas, Bush is being held to a different standard than Clinton was or Kerry will be if he is elected.
The one hitch here is that Kerry actually is an anti-war internationalist. It is possible that he doesn't understand that he will be given latitude that Bush does not have.
Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on how President Kerry might handle his foreign policy.
Why didn't we secure Iraq? The Democrats have come up with an answer for Bush's overthrow of Iraq - it would have been fine if Bush had a plan to "win the peace." This usually includes more troops on the ground in Iraq (Kerry's version has foreign troops in Iraq but there just are not two to three hundred thousand spare troops in the free world).
There are lots of factors here. We would have had more troops at the fall of Baghdad if Turkey had let us invade from the north. Thanks to the French, they didn't, but they let us think that they would until it was too late to move the troops.
For propaganda purposes, we were slow to declare ourselves an occupying force. We wanted to be liberators, not occupiers. There is a difference under international law. Until we declared ourselves occupiers we could not declare martial law and stop the looting (which needed more troops who were in Turkey). This was a mistake but it was unavoidable. If we had known that the French were being bribed by Saddam we might have planned differently but war never goes as planned.
We did have a plan for dealing with post-invasion Iraq. We were going to rehabilitate it the same way that we did Germany and Japan after WWII. This didn't work out because we didn't shatter the Iraqi army the way that we did Germany and Japan. We made a quick rush to Baghdad only to find that the Iraqi army had vanished.
Why didn't we occupy Iraq with 400,000 troops like so many critics suggest? Because we don't have them. Clinton cut the army manpower by 1/3. He left Bush an army geared to a Clinton-era war - bombing the enemy into submission and sending in UN peacekeepers to mop up.
Should Bush admit that the world's only superpower is no longer strong enough to occupy a country like Iraq? Would that make us safer?
Should Bush have waited years to overthrow Saddam until he could re-build the army? He would have lost momentum in the War on Terrorism and possibly the sanctions on Iraq would have been lifted and Saddam would have re-armed. The point of the war was to stop this.
And what if Bush were to strip enough troops from other bases to pump up the Iraqi occupation force? Democrats already complain about the costs of the war. What if they tripled?
Bush can't talk about any of this. The Democrats would crucify him if he did. The Democrats will not talk about any of it. It would undercut their attacks on Bush.
A few days ago I complained about the Media Fund's radio ad linking Bush and bin Laden. What I said was mild compared to www.factcheck.org's assessment of the ad.
This anti-Bush radio ad is among the worst distortions we've seen in what has become a very ugly campaign. It states as fact some of the most sensational falsehoods that Michael Moore merely insinuated in his anti-Bush movie Farenheit 9/11 .
This one is wrong, wrong, wrong.
This ad rushes in where even Michael Moore feared to tread in his anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11 . Moore merely led viewers to believe -- but never actually stated -- that the bin Laden flight left while US airspace was closed. And viewers who listened closely -- very closely -- might have heard Moore acknowledge that the bin Ladens were in fact interviewed by the FBI before being allowed to leave.
Read the whole thing.
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