Bill Clinton and Karl Rove get creative with history.

The Way It Wasn't

Bill Clinton and Karl Rove get creative with history.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 7:07 PM ET Nov 28, 2007

In the course of a few days, two of the country's best-known political figures — Bill Clinton and Karl Rove — have both offered their own new versions of the politics surrounding the war in Iraq. The only problem is that their revisionist accounts are hard to square with almost everything that has been said or written before.

Clinton is being widely criticized by bloggers and political foes for claiming, while campaigning for his wife in Iowa, that he "opposed Iraq from the beginning." His comments are seemingly contradicted by a well-documented historical record—showing the former president explaining his position quite differently at the time. "Saddam is gone and good riddance," Clinton said in an April 16, 2003, speech in New York. Clinton defended president Bush's decision to go to war, even though no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found. "I don't think you can criticize the president for trying to act on the belief that they have a substantial amount of chemical and biological stock ...That is what I was always told."

Jay Carson, a Clinton spokesman, was quoted this week as pointing to other comments Clinton made shortly before the war, in which the former president suggested U.N. inspectors should be given more time to look for weapons. But even the most cursory Lexis-Nexis search shows that Clinton never publicly distanced himself from Bush's overall approach before the war. "I think he's doing the right thing right now," Clinton told CNN interviewer Larry King on Feb. 6, 2003. Moreover, he continued to defend Bush—and the congressional vote to authorize the war that his wife supported—even as it became clear in the late spring of 2003 that the U.S. occupation was not going well. "I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Clinton said in a college commencement speech in Mississippi on May 18, 2003.

Meanwhile Rove has engaged in some equally startling revisionist history. In an hourlong interview with Charlie Rose that aired Nov. 21, the night before Thanksgiving, the former presidential strategist (and now an occasional NEWSWEEK commentator) claimed that "one of the untold stories about the war" is that the White House never wanted the Congress to vote on the resolution authorizing the president to wage war in Iraq before the 2002 midterm elections. Rove said he would tell the full story in the book he is currently writing. But he offered the first eyebrow-raising glimpse in the Rose interview.

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Rove's comments seem to fly in the face of a barrage of White House speeches and pronouncements pushing for a quick vote on the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 to deal with what Bush called a threat of "unique urgency." The White House launched its campaign for an Iraq war resolution by calling congressional leaders to a meeting with the president on Sept. 4. At the meeting, just two months before the midterm elections, Bush first told them of his intention to press for an Iraq war resolution before they adjourned. Two weeks later, the White House sent its sweeping draft war resolution to Capitol Hill, and began pushing aggressively for a vote right away, before members went home to campaign. "I appreciate the fact that the leadership recognizes we've got to move before the elections," Bush said at a White House ceremony on Sept. 19. All of this was no accident: at an earlier Sept. 3 strategy meeting of top White House advisers, then White House chief of staff Andrew Card "said the game plan was to ask Congress to vote on a formal resolution authorizing military force in Iraq before the midterm elections," wrote journalist Bob Woodward in "Plan of Attack," a book about the run-up to the Iraq War that benefited from direct access to key participants.

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URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/72773

So Sparky Isikoff of Kathleen Willey and Linda Tripp fame is back with another example of what he thinks is journalism. In this hit piece, he claims that since a Lexis-Nexus search does not show Clinton railing against the war, that means he must have been for it. And he also quotes Clinton as saying he supports what Bush is doing NOW without pointing out that that "now" was BEFORE the damn war.

And what's behind dredging all this up? Hillary hatred, that's what. Clinton Derangement Syndrome. They can't find enough REAL things to hold against the Clintons, so they make them up. And they try to attack Hillary by attacking Bill -- who is not running this time.

Isikoff, like Russert and Matthews, is largely responsible for the Chimp being in the WH instead of Gore. "Journalists" like them do our country more damage than terrorists can ever do.