Whacking the Rats

Remember when the NY Post had its "BUSH KNEW" headline a couple of years back, after it leaked that Bush may have had a wee bit of warning about 9/11 in August? Reader c reminds us of the Bush administration's reaction then. From Newsweek:

It was supposed to be a routine drop-by, little more: A quick strategic review with the president before he awarded a medal to Nancy Reagan in the Capitol Rotunda. But by the time George W. Bush arrived at a private gathering of Republican senators in the Mansfield Room, a vicious political war had erupted on the Hill, ignited by the disclosure that he had been warned last August about the possibility of Al Qaeda hijackings in the United States. A suddenly embattled president felt the need to talk tough--at length--behind closed doors. "No question, when he walked into the room he was shaken," one senator later said.
What followed, according to several sources who were in the room last Thursday afternoon, was a jut-jawed, disjointed discourse with a tinge of diatribe and a crescendo of podium pounding. The president dismissed questions about his administration's counterterrorism actions--or lack of them--before September 11 as mere Democratic partisanship. "I sniff some politics in the air," he scoffed. Then he wandered off to the Middle East, recounting a blunt Oval Office conversation with Ariel Sharon. He said he'd asked the Israeli leader if he really hated Yasir Arafat. Sharon had answered yes, according to the president. "I looked him straight in the eye and said, 'Well, are you going to kill him?' " Sharon said no, to which the president said he'd replied, "That's good."

Bush was just getting warmed up. "Now you guys really got me going," he said. He threatened to block the entire defense bill if it contained money for the controversial and costly Crusader artillery system. "I mean it. I'll veto it," he said tersely, glancing at Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, where Crusader would be built. Bush ended with an attack on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. "He's starving his own people," Bush said, and imprisoning intellectuals in "a Gulag the size of Houston." The president called him a "pygmy" and compared him to "a spoiled child at a dinner table." Stunned senators didn't know quite what to make of the performance. "It was like in church, when the sermon goes on too long and you're not sure what the point is," one told NEWSWEEK. "Nobody dared look at anybody else."

Democrats, trying to sound more sorrowful than angry (let alone delighted) demanded answers. Noting an instantly famous headline (BUSH KNEW) in the normally pro-Bush New York Post, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took to the Senate floor to express her concern. So did party leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt. The rest of the party joined in, conveniently ignoring Clinton-administration failures and the extensive pre-9-11 knowledge of their own members of congressional intelligence committees. "It was the attack of the mattress rats," a top White House aide said bitterly. "They were everywhere."

Soon after Bush's chesty Mansfield Room talk, Team Bush gathered itself, and fought back hard--"whacking the rats," as the aide put it. They dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to wave the patriotic flag at a political dinner in New York, where he warned critics not to make "incendiary comments" that are "totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war." The Bushies even took the unprecedented step of wheeling out Laura Bush to defend her husband. Traveling in Budapest, Hungary, Mrs. Bush stayed up late to watch a Condi Rice briefing. The next morning the First Lady volunteered to reporters that it was "very sad that people would play upon the victims' families' emotions, or all Americans' emotions."