Thursday, October 19, 2006

Bill Clinton, Mark Steyn & Those Mangy GOP Dogs

(We had a dynamite poltical segment on last night's Kudlow & Company with Tony Blankley, Mark Steyn, and Tony Coelho. The following is a brilliant exchange from conservative genius/author Mark Steyn - who incidentally, has a new book out which is getting rave reviews. It's next on my reading list...)

KUDLOW: I want to ask you, Mark Steyn, right off the top, you heard Mr. Clinton. He says if you believe those mangy dogs, the Republicans, the 'Dems will tax you into the poor house and on the way there, there'll be a terrorist on every street corner.' Mark Steyn, what is your assessment of what Clinton is saying out there?

MARK STEYN: Well, he summed up the two basic core beliefs of the Democratic Party - that you need higher taxes, and that there is no terrorist threat. And both of those are profoundly wrong. The first makes us small like Europe which is basically voting for national suicide. And the second, one reason why there are terrorists on so many street corners in the world is because Clinton did nothing about it in the gay '90s. In fairness to him, that's a more credible Democrat message, a more credible message than saying, you know, 'Vote for the Democrats because there is gay Republican congressman predator on every corner,' which has been the Democrats' message for the last couple of weeks. That's ridiculous.

...In a way, there is either a threat or there isn't a threat. And Clinton's strategy of just joking and saying, `Oh, there's no threat. It's just some cockamamie thing got up by the Bush administration, actually works better than what those House and Senate Democrats did which is vote to make themselves look like the terrorists' rights party. I think it's clear that there's a lot of Republican anger among the base and conservative anger among the base about the conduct of this war, but every time the Democrats in the Senate and the House have to take a vote on issues like the detainees in Guantanamo, they put themselves in a very unattractive corner electorally. And I simply think that the American people are not ready to go there.

(Note: In the Senate, 75 percent of the Democrats voted against the terrorist interrogation bill. In the House, more than 80 percent voted against it. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) - who vehemently opposed the Patriot Act - actually said that he's "convinced that future generations will view passage of this bill as a grave error." Huh?)