- Among Democrats, only former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont has gone so far as to say out loud that he believes the administration is "manipulating the release of information in order to affect the president's campaign."
And even those remarks, barbed as they are, are no sharper than the comments some Republicans leveled at President Bill Clinton six years ago, when he ordered cruise missile strikes against Qaeda outposts in retaliation for the bombing of American embassies in East Africa days after confessing to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Daniel R. Coats, then a Republican senator from Indiana and now Mr. Bush's ambassador to Germany, summed up his feeling at the time.
"The danger here," Mr. Coats said then of Mr. Clinton, "is that once a president loses credibility with the Congress, as this president has through months of lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions, stonewalling, it raises into doubt everything he does and everything he says, and maybe everything he doesn't do and doesn't say." He added: "I just hope and pray the decision that was made was made on the basis of sound judgment, and made for the right reasons, and not made because it was necessary to save the president's job."
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