by Chris Stirewalt
Washington Examiner
January 4, 2010
When Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill was trying to unseat incumbent Jim Talent in 2006, she frequently bashed President George W. Bush for being incompetent on terrorism. As she told NBC’s Tim Russert, “This is not an administration that’s ready to protect us.”
McCaskill argued throughout her campaign that Bush had made the nation more vulnerable to terrorism by invading Iraq, and she harped on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina as proof that Bush had left the nation susceptible to attack.
McCaskill, who used a wounded Iraq veteran and a woman with Parkinson’s disease in her ads attacking Talent for budget votes and stem cell policy, also attacked Bush for domestic wiretapping.
And she favored withdrawing all troops from Iraq by 2008 because the Bush troop surge was “a wild failure” that had bred a “culture of dependency” in Iraq. “We are not breeding a democracy,” she warned.
But that was a long time ago, politically speaking — before McCaskill became one of the first senators to endorse Barack Obama, before she voted to extend the same domestic wiretapping she once deplored, before she joined her fellow Democrats in congratulating the Iraqis on their new framework for national elections, before Obama committed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and before he became responsible for keeping Americans safe from terrorism.
Now Obama is under attack for the way his administration handled the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner, and McCaskill and other Democrats are crying foul.
“I think it is unfair and, frankly, political to take pot shots at the president as we respond to this failure in our systems,” McCaskill sniffed to guest host Gloria Borger on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The article continues at the Examiner.