Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director George Tenet briefed the top Congressional leaders on this information, but Tom Daschle remains unconvinced. It’s the very kind of conclusive proof he said he wanted, but suddenly that’s not enough. This guy moves the goalposts every time there’s a question of using force against Iraq. His new thing is an obsession over getting a “coalition,” by which he probably means every single nation and bridge club on earth voting to attack.
Even if Bush put such a coalition together (Hello, Belize?), Daschle would come up with some other pre-condition. This from the same Democrats who supported Bill Clinton when he attacked Iraq. Heck, they’d have supported him if he called for the use of nuclear weapons, because he was being impeached. But now that there’s a Republican in the White House, all the heated rhetoric that we cover in Clinton ’98: We Have to Get Saddam, is replaced by a million random conditions that Bush must meet before we can act to defend ourselves.