Terry McAuliffe has accused the President of "McCarthyism," his words, not mine. Over at
Powerline, Hindraker notes that it's odd that McAuliffe would try to call the kettle black. But this, too, is typical Clintonian politics.
I remember when the Clinton Administration was constantly in front of Judge Royce Lamberth. The Judge was clearly losing patience with a pattern of misbehavior by the Clinton Administration:
They had released letters in an attempt to smear Kathleen Willey
They had failed to turn over documents in the matter of the Interior Department and the Potowotomie Indians
They hadn't bothered to tell him about all sorts of internal emails concerning the case
At the same time, the Chief District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson was bypassing the random computer process for a number of other embarassing cases, all of which somehow ended up in her hands [Washington Post, August 5, 1999]. By late March of 2000, Congress was interested in this peculiarity.
Clinton made some comment about the Privacy Act case as it applied to Mrs. Willey and the White House: "Mr. Clinton looked amused and replied, 'Well, he does seem to have somehow acquired a significant percentage of the cases involving the White House,'" [New York Times, March 30, 2000] clearly hinting at some mis- or malfeasance. Note: he's accusing a judge of doing something that there's no evidence for, doing something that a sympathetic judge is clearly doing - jerry-rigging the case assignment process.
This is classic. At best, he casts aspersions on a troublesome public figure. At worst, he makes any counter-claims seem like parroting, and can hide behind the claims that "everybody does it."
