ATTACK ON CRITICS: RNC ad targets Reid
Commercial accuses senator of flip-flopping on war in Iraq
The ad, which RNC sources said will air in Las Vegas, provides Reid's office number and tells viewers to call the Nevada senator and "tell him to stop playing partisan politics and stand behind our troops."
On Thursday, Reid joined a growing number of Democrats to publicly condemn the administration for attacking critics of the war.
"Instead of giving our troops a plan for success or answering the serious questions of the American people, they've decided to start up the Rove/Cheney attack machine," Reid said Thursday on the Senate floor. "We're at war. We need a commander in chief, not a campaigner in chief. We need leadership from the White House, not more white-washing of the very serious issues confronting us in Iraq."
Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled Senate passed legislation encouraging President Bush to change course in Iraq. Democrats had pushed for a timetable for withdrawal.
The RNC ad begins with comments Bush made in Pennsylvania on Veteran's Day, in a speech that mentioned the bipartisan congressional support for the war in Iraq, but also criticized Democrats for "rewriting history."
"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," Bush said in Tobyhanna, Pa., on Nov. 11.
The ad tries to paint Democrats as flip-floppers on the war, in similar fashion to the RNC and Bush campaigns' attacks on John Kerry last year.
The spot includes statements from Reid and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Jay Rockefeller. Former President Clinton also appears in the ad.
"Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community," Reid says in the ad, in video taken from a Sept. 18, 2002, CNN "Inside Politics" show. "And I think that the president's approaching this in the right fashion."
The ad is part of an RNC campaign to discredit the critics of the war policy at a time when the president's poll numbers have sunk to record-low levels and a majority of Americans say they do not trust the president.
These repugs truly think that the American public are the stupidest people on the planet! They take a quote from BEFORE the war started to use it as defense for the war!!!! And, the stupidest person on the planet would still know that the president has access to information that the Senate does not have access to, which is the basis of the argument! AND, that is beside the point that the Senate never voted for war!
Of course, it has already been proven that the administration DID manipulate the intelligence and, of course, we now know that they did also "out" an undercover CIA agent simply as payback for Wilson calling bush on his lies - even though the administration admitted that they were wrong on that issue - after Wilson came out with the truth, naturally.
And do you think they could come up with a new tag phrase?! Jeez, considering the amount of "flip-flopping" that bush has done lately, you'd think that they would hesitate to use that worn-out phrase!
