It's not terribly surprising how little major media attention was given to Bill Clinton's statements on CNN the other night, when he called in to Larry King Live to weigh in on the Uranium-Niger non-scandal. Normally they breathlessly report his every utterance as the closest thing to Revealed Truth. This time though, it's different.
I suspect Bill knows that the U.S. forces continue to amass evidence of WMD in Iraq, and that eventually this evidence will be made public, smearing yet more egg on the faces of critics of Bush administration policy. He seems to be suggesting that Democrats follow their own advice and "move on", for their own good:
"I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying 'we probably shouldn't have said that,'" Clinton told CNN's Larry King in a phone interview Tuesday evening."You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. You can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now."
More importantly, he confirms what is, in his words, "incontestable", and in the process, pretty much endorsed the Bush administration's actions. Here's the summary of his comments on the King show:
Clinton also said Tuesday night that at the end of his term, there was "a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for " in Iraq."At the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what [Saddam] had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes, and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it.
"But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say, 'You got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.'"
Clinton also told King: "People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."
No wonder the story has been conspicuously absent from the media since the remarks were made. They don't serve the overall agenda of undermining the progress in Iraq and discrediting the Bush administration.
Charles Krauthammer lists the new strategic realities that exist in the Middle East now as a result of Bush's leadership, and explains the Dems need to keep the "scandal" alive:
The fact that the Democrats and the media can't seem to let go of it, however, is testimony to their need (and ability) to change the subject. From what? From the moral and strategic realities of Iraq. The moral reality finally burst through the yellowcake fog with the death of the Hussein Brothers, psychopathic torturers who would today be running Iraq if not for the policy enunciated by President Bush in that very same State of the Union address.That moral reality is a little hard for the left to explain, given the fact that it parades as the guardian of human rights and all-around general decency, and rallied millions to try to prevent the very policy that liberated Iraq from Uday and Qusay's reign of terror.