September 25, 2006 at 09:11:09

Howard Dean: You can't trust Republicans on national security -- and two things proved it yesterday:

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You can't trust Republicans on national security -- and two things proved it yesterday:

1) In a powerful interview that aired yesterday, President Bill Clinton took on the extremist Republican propaganda about 9/11 -- and Fox News tried to cover up the fact that the Bush administration downgraded terrorism as a priority before September 11th and has failed to eliminate Osama bin Laden since the attacks.

2) An explosive report on the still-classified National Intelligence Estimate states that the "invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and Republicans have been trying to cover it up.

This is what we're fighting against every day -- an administration covering up of the Bush failure of 9/11 and covering up an honest look at the war in Iraq and the war on terror.

You know that Democrats have a real plan for destroying Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, fixing the mess in Iraq, and really securing us at home.

But we've always had those things -- the problem until now has been our willingness to stand up and fight for them in the face of fear mongering, bullying and intimidation from the other side.

That's why we're going on the offense on national security. The future of our party, and of our country, depends on the ability of Democrats to get a strong national security message out in all 50 states this year. Donate to make it happen and watch President Clinton fight back now:

http://www.democrats.org/offense

Here's the meat of the Fox News interview with President Clinton, where he's had enough of the right-wing revisionist history from the propaganda machine:

CLINTON: I'm being asked this on the Fox network. ABC just had a right-wing conservative run in their little Pathway to 9/11, falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission report, with three things asserted against me directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. ... And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much -- same people.

Over a quarter million Americans stood up to ABC and beat back the right-wing Republican 9/11 propaganda that tries to cover up the Bush administration's huge failures to protect America before and after the attacks.

Yesterday Bill Clinton did exactly what Democrats need to do in this election -- to stand up to the right-wing and tell the truth. We will not let the Republicans twist history and distort reality.

We're sick of playing defense against a Republican leadership that uses national security to scare people to win elections. We're not going to be pushed around, spun, and defamed by right-wing extremists and those whom they use to disseminate their propaganda.

Our plan for this election is to go on the offense -- to talk straight about the Republican failures and lay out a clear Democratic plan to take American foreign policy and national security in a better direction.

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