September ’02 Swimmer: Saddam a Threat

I’m sure what Senator Kennedy would say, if confronted with this, and rest assured he won’t be, he’s not going to appear anywhere but friendly media and friendly media will not throw this back at him, even though he said it, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. But he said it, did a 180, and I bet he would say, “Well, I didn’t realize then just how much fraud the administration was engaging in. I didn’t know how much the president was lying back then and had no clue.” That’s what he would say. Then this business of the imminent threat is used again, and it’s important friends to point out again that the president said precisely we must act before there is an imminent threat. And the whole weapons-of-mass-destruction business, if you remember, was to go in there and get rid of them before they are constituted for usage. Let it be said back on September 27th, Ted Kennedy had no quarrel of their existence then.
I’ll tell you something else. Clinton had said the same thing in 1998. Let’s be honest, folks. Every Democrat in Washington believes that there were weapons of mass destruction. They believed Clinton in ’98; they voted for a use-of-force authorization. They couldn’t wait to be first to get there and author it, sign it. They believed it. The Democrats and Congress were running around, they’d seen the files and the research from the intelligence agencies. Everybody knew that’s what the story was. Everybody believed it. Let’s put it that way – everybody believed it. And the reason the use-of-force authorization came forward by the Congress was they believed it, everybody believed it. The United Nations believed it. There were resolutions throughout ten years that Iraq had to get rid of them. Now, let’s just admit this. Everybody thought that there were weapons of mass destruction. Nobody was saying Bush was engaging in fraud. I think it is very cheap, typical though, but it is very cheap of the Democrats now that there appears to be little, if any, evidence of weapons of mass destruction, it’s very cheap for them to all of a sudden start acting like they thought all along there weren’t any, and to furthermore accuse the president of knowing all along there weren’t any, when they in fact were right there. Remember, they’re the ones who wanted the debate on it again. We theorized here the president already had an authorization for the use of force from Congress, one that was signed by Congress or passed by Congress shortly after September 11th, 2001. But that wasn’t good enough for them. They were demanding to get back in. And why? Because they knew the country supported this, they thought it was a grave danger and they didn’t want to be left out when this whole thing was a big success, right? So they got their debate, they got it right before the 2002 elections. They did it stupidly, took their own domestic issues off the front page in order to have this debate. Now, after the fact, they’re trying to make everybody believe they didn’t believe this from the get-go, they never thought there was a big threat, they tried to warn the country of this, and now Bush is engaging in fraud and bribery.

Now, this is typical of a party that has no soul. It is typical of a party that has no confidence in itself. It is typical of a party that cannot be honest with voters about what it really believes and what it wants to do. It is typical of a party that has only the belief that it could win by discrediting its enemies, and I do mean enemies, not opponents. They do not think they have anything worth voting for. They know they don’t have anything worth voting for. They know they can’t be honest about what they believe and who they are. All they can do is tear down their opponents, lie about them, try to discredit them, and this is an example of it, folks. To now come forth and say that they knew all along, or imply, anyway, that they knew all along that this weapons-of-mass-destruction business was overdone. Here’s another way to illustrate this. What did the Clintons say. What did the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright – you had Bill Clinton himself saying after 2001, what is their belated spin? Their belated spin was “Hey, you know what? In the exit interviews when we were leaving here, we told the incoming Bush administration that Osama bin Laden was the biggest threat, remember that? We did, we told them, and they didn’t listen to us, they didn’t listen to a word we said. We told them bin Laden was the biggest threat this country was facing. See, they didn’t listen to us, and we got 9/11.” Did not Clinton try that? He did that, folks, and it was a total lie. He had ignored Osama bin Laden all through his administration.

So Clinton comes out and he says that the bin Laden team poses the biggest threat and so forth. Well, Clinton also warned the new administration about Saddam three years before they took office, Bush took office, 1998. It was a huge address to Congress, big time, all the Democrats supported that address. I remember Bill Cohen going on Meet the Press with that box ostensibly of anthrax saying this would wipe out New York, getting everybody all scared to death. This is what Saddam is working on, 1998, everybody believed it. Clinton tells everybody, 1998. Now Clinton leaves office, “Hey, bin Laden, we told them bin Laden.” What else is Clinton lying about? These people believe what they want to believe when they think that it will cast them in a positive light. Now they’re trying to rely on what they think is, for lack of a better word, ignorance of the American people. Or the lack of memory. They think you aren’t paying attention or you weren’t paying attention and you won’t remember how eager they were to support this resolution, how eager they were in 1998 to go get Saddam, how eager they were even as Ted Kennedy’s quotes from September of last year indicate. No, now they’ve got to try to make everybody think they never supported this, they were always leery, they always believed Blix, they always thought this and that. I mean it’s hard to single out one, but I think this is one of the greatest examples of the bankruptcy of moral fiber and soul that this party has.

Well, I just was asked by the program observer, outside of Massachusetts, is Kennedy really respected by the country? The Democrats, yeah – he’s their lion, he’s their lion of liberalism. The Democrats, out in the country, yes, in big numbers. I mean it may not be as big as it was years ago. Why do you think Kennedy’s gone on all these shows all the sudden lately? He’s the only one that’s gotten any credibility. Daschle doesn’t have it; all these other guys have bombed out, they’re looked at as jokes. Ted Kennedy is looked at as infallible by the Democrats. He never used to appear on a CNN show in the afternoon, Judy Woodruff. That’s just in the past year, year and a half that he’s been doing that. He never conducted interviews. He was always unavailable; he was always way up in the clouds. He was up there on the pedestal of the Democrats you couldn’t get to. Now he’s out there talking to all of them because he’s viewed as one of the last of them with any kind of credibility when it comes to attacking Bush and the Republicans.
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