The Onion has news on the latest campaign development:

After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton announced Monday that he is joining the 2008 presidential race, saying he “could no longer resist the urge.”

“My fellow Americans, I am sick and tired of not being president,” said Clinton, introducing his wife at a “Hillary ’08” rally. “For seven agonizing years, I have sat idly by as others experienced the joys of campaigning, debating, and interacting with the people of this great nation, and I simply cannot take it anymore. I have to be president again. I have to.”

He continued, “It is with a great sense of relief that I say to all of you today, ‘Screw it. I’m in.'”

In a show of respect, Clinton then completed his introduction of Hillary Clinton, calling her a “wonderful wife and worthy political adversary,” and warmly shook her hand as she approached the podium. A clearly shocked Mrs. Clinton got halfway through her speech about the nation’s obligation to its children before walking briskly offstage.

Read the whole thing.

His democrat opponents, Billary and Edwards, have been hissing like drenched cats over his heresy, since Barack Obama frankly admitted in Reno:

I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.

Obama even told the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board that:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

John Edwards responded: “I would never use Ronald Reagan as an example of change.”

Hillary, too, was quick to respond in predictable terms.

I have to say, you know, my leading opponent the other day said that he thought the Republicans had better ideas than Democrats the last ten to fifteen years. That’s not the way I remember the last ten to fifteen years.

“I don’t think it’s a better idea to privatize Social Security. I don’t think it’s a better idea to try to eliminate the minimum wage. I don’t think it’s a better idea to undercut health benefits and to give drug companies the right to make billions of dollars by providing prescription drugs to Medicare recipients. I don’t think it’s a better idea to shut down the government, to drive us into debt.”

NBC:

Bill Clinton joined his wife in targeting Barack Obama’s statement about Republican ideas, saying that his “legs fell out” when he read it.

Appendix B (Footnote 1 – page 87) of the Final Report of the Independent Counsel In Re: Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association: Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others describes alleged attempts by persons unknown to intimidate Kathleen Willey from testifying against President William Jefferson Clinton in the Paula Jones case.

Willey also alleged that in the period immediately preceding her January 1998 Jones deposition, her cat disappeared, her tires were punctured, and a male jogger whom she did not recognize approached her at her rural home, called her by her name, and asked about her tires, cat (which he named), children (whom he named), attorney, and her attorney’s children (whom he also named), saying “I hope you’re getting the message” or “You’re just not getting the message, are you?” Willey 3/6/98 Int. at 18; Willey 3/10/98 GJ at 123–27. At her Jones deposition, however, Willey testified no one had tried to discourage her from testifying. Willey 1/11/98 Depo. at 86–87.

Willey told the grand jury that even though she was “terrified for my safety” because of these incidents, “I did give consideration to maybe not—maybe not being very truthful in [her Jones v. Clinton] deposition because I thought that my—that people close to me were in jeopardy.”

WorldNetDaily reports today:

Kathleen Willey, the woman who says Bill Clinton groped her in the Oval Office, claims she was the target of an unusual house burglary over the weekend that nabbed a manuscript for her upcoming book, which promises explosive revelations that could damage Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Willey told WND little else was taken from her rural Virginia home as she slept alone upstairs – electronics and jewelry were left behind – and she believes the Clintons were behind it.

The break-in, she said, reminded her of the widely reported incident 10 years ago in which she claimed she was threatened near the same Richmond-area home by a stranger just two days before she was to testify against President Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

The theft of the manuscript early Saturday morning was suspicious, she told WND, coming only days after the first mainstream media mention of her upcoming book, which is expected to include accusations of campaign finance violations and new revelations about harassment and threats by the Clintons and their associates.

“Here we go again; it’s the same thing that happened before,” Willey told WND. “They want you to know they were there. And they got what they wanted. They pretty much managed to terrorize me again. It scared me to death. It’s an awful feeling to know you’re sound asleep upstairs and someone is downstairs.”

The book, “Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton” by World Ahead Publishing, WND Books’ partner, is due for release in November. Willey said the stolen manuscript was not the book’s final copy.

Among its revelations is Willey’s identification of the person who threatened her just prior to her testimony against President Clinton – a man who turned out to be linked to the Clintons.

Willey believes the break-in and theft were prompted by teasers of the book’s contents published last week in U.S. News and World Report’s “Washington Whispers” column and the New York Daily News. …

Longtime Clinton lawyer David Kendall was not available for immediate response to Willey’s new claims, and Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign has not responded.

Anne Reynolds, crime analyst for the Powhatan County Sheriff’s Department, told WND she could only confirm, due to department restrictions, that there was a break-in and entry reported Saturday in the vicinity of Willey’s address and that an officer responded and turned the case over to the criminal investigations department.

It certainly sounds like the Clintons have resumed active political careers again, doesn’t it?

Michael Goodwin, in the Daily News, takes the occasion of Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of George W. Bush commutation of the Libby prison sentence to do some remembering.

When President Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence Monday, Sen. Clinton was quick to denounce him. Under Bush, she said, “cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.” …

But when I stumbled on a list of Bill Clinton’s pardons posted on the Drudge Report, I was instantly back on Jan. 20, 2001. That’s when Clinton, in his final hours as President, opened the floodgates, issuing 140 pardons and 36 commutations.

The list of people Clinton let off the hook was a rogue’s gallery of drug dealers, petty criminals and the politically well-connected. One was Bill Clinton’s brother Roger, one was a college friend and another was a former business partner. Their lawyers’ connections were key in others, including the lawyer for a man who laundered more than $100 million for the Cali cartel.

Some cases reeked of blatant corruption. Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, collected $400,000 from two big-time criminals who got pardons. When the news of the payments broke, the Clintons claimed surprise and demanded Rodham give the money back.

But Bill Clinton never gave Denise Rich her money back. The former wife of disgraced financier Marc Rich gave $450,000 to Clinton’s presidential library and raised and contributed more than $1 million to campaigns of the Clintons and other Democrats. Her husband, who had fled the country rather than fight charges of massive tax fraud and trading with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, suddenly received a pardon. “Utterly false,” Bill Clinton later said about charges he sold the pardon. “There was absolutely no quid pro quo.”

A friend of mine suggested that the best rejoinder to Hillary would be for the White House to issue a pardon to Hillary and Bill for any of the crimes during his governorship in Arkansas or during the Clinton presidency for which prosecutable evidence may yet one day emerge.

The New York Post is shocked, shocked that the Las Vegas police department would be so remiss as to permit a police report containing an “unconfirmed” mention of the former president to be made public.

The police report quotes professional woman Esperanza Brooks as boasting of her employees and clientele:

“These are not your average girls. Some of them have worked with Bill Clinton,” Brooks told an undercover officer while assuring him of her girls’ cleanliness.

In a move calculated to forestall further inquiries into his thefts and destruction of Clinton Administration National Security documents from the National Archives, Sandy Berger has offered to accept voluntary disbarment.

He hasn’t been practicing law recently, it’s true. But it seems unlikely that he would be so willing to relinquish that valuable professional status without serious concern over what might come out under his own cross examination at a bar hearing.

Washington Times

Samuel R. Berger, the Clinton White House national security adviser who was caught taking highly classified documents from the National Archives, has agreed to forfeit his license to practice law.

In a written statement issued by Larry Breuer, Mr. Berger’s attorney, the former national security adviser said he pleaded guilty in the Justice Department investigation, accepted the penalties sought by the department and recognized that his law license would be affected.

“I have decided to voluntarily relinquish my license,” he said. “While I derived great satisfaction from years of practicing law, I have not done so for 15 years and do not envision returning to the profession. I am very sorry for what I did, and I deeply apologize.”

In giving up his license, Mr. Berger avoids being cross-examined by the Board on Bar Counsel, where he risked further disclosure of specific details of his theft. The agreement is expected to be formalized today.

Mr. Berger, national security adviser from 1997 to 2001, was convicted of removing documents from the Archives in 2005 while preparing to testify before the September 11 commission.

Fined $50,000, sentenced to 100 hours of community service and barred from access to classified material for three years, he also was ordered to undergo a polygraph test if asked — although the Justice Department has declined to administer the test despite urging by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform.

The Washington Post reports that House Republican inquiries have revealed that Sandy Berger’s removal of Clinton Administration secret memos from the National Archives was treated with surprising incuriosity by certain elements in the Justice Department.

A report last month by the Republican staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said for the first time that Berger’s visits were so badly mishandled that Archives officials had acknowledged not knowing if he removed anything else and destroyed it. The committee further argued that the 9/11 Commission should have been told more about Berger and about Brachfeld’s concerns, a suggestion that resonated with Philip Zelikow, the commission’s former executive director.

Zelikow said in an interview last week that “I think all of my colleagues would have wanted to have all the information at the time that we learned from the congressional report, because that would have triggered some additional questions, including questions we could have posed to Berger under oath.”

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI — including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time — in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

In an April 1, 2005, press conference and private statements to the commission, the Justice Department stated instead that Berger had access only to copied documents, not originals. They also said the sole documents Berger admitted taking — five copies of a 2001 terrorism study — were later provided to the commission.

Those assertions conflicted with a September 2004 statement to Brachfeld by Nancy Kegan Smith, who directs the Archives’ presidential documents staff and let Berger view the documents in her office in violation of secrecy rules. Smith said “she would never know what if any original documents were missing,” Brachfeld reported in an internal memo.

In a letter to House lawmakers last week, Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling did not address the issue of why the department told the commission so little. But Hertling wrote that in numerous interviews, “neither Mr. Berger nor any other witness provided the Department with evidence that Mr. Berger had taken any documents beyond the five.”

There must have been something very damaging in there. Possibly some very conspicuous failure to deal with Osama bin Laden during the late 1990s, well before 9/11, which was sufficiently embarassing to William Jefferson Clinton that Sandy Berger was willing to take some serious risks to remove from the record.

The Clintons apparently have dodged another bullet. You almost have to admire their adroitness at doing exactly as they please, and then baffling their opponents with brilliant and brazen maneuvers when in danger of being called to account. Remember the missing Rose Law Firm records which turned up in the White House finally, very shortly after the Statute of Limitations had expired?

Dinesh D’Souza thinks it was the result of the Clinton Administration’s cowardice and passivity.

More than five years after 9/11, the crucial question of why the Islamic radicals decided to strike America remains unanswered. Recall that for at least two decades prior to 9/11, radical Muslims were focused on fighting in their own countries. They were trying to overthrow their local governments and to establish Islamic states under sharia law. America was not their target.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, two of the leading Muslim radicals, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden, decided on a new strategy. They abandoned the tactic of fighting the “near enemy” and decided to take the battle to the “far enemy,” specifically the United States. If Zawahiri and Bin Laden had not changed course, 9/11 would not have happened.

Why, then, did they do so? In his book the Far Enemy, political scientist Fawaz Gerges argues that the radical Muslims’ strategy of fighting the near enemy proved unsuccessful, and so they decided to try something else. “When jihadis met their Waterloo on home-front battles,” Gerges writes, they “turned their guns against the West in an effort to stop the revolutionary ship from sinking.” This may be correct as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Gerges fails to explain why Muslim radicals like Zawahiri and Bin Laden, who apparently could not defeat their local governments, came to the conclusion that they could defeat the vastly more formidable United States.

Bin Laden himself supplies the answer to this question. He says he developed the suspicion that despite its outward show of power and affluence, the far enemy was weaker and more vulnerable than the near enemy…

During the mid to late 1990s, the radical Muslims tested America’s resolve by launching a series of attacks on American targets. These were massive attacks, unprecedented in the damage they inflicted. There was the Khobar Towers attack on American facilities in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa, the suicide assault on the American warship the U.S.S. Cole.

Yet in every case the Clinton administration reacted either by doing nothing, or with desultory counterattacks like a missile strike against largely unoccupied Afghan tents and the bombing of what was reported to be a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan. Clearly these responses inflicted little harm to Al Qaeda and actually made America look ridiculous in the eyes of the Muslim world. Consequently, Bin Laden became convinced that his theory of American irresolution and weakness was substantially correct. By his own account he became emboldened to conceive of a grander and more devastating strike on American shores, the strike that occurred on 9/11.

Even so, this strike could have been prevented had the Clinton administration acted on intelligence leads and struck back at Bin Laden, when it had the chance. Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer estimates that during the second term of the Clinton administration America had approximately 10 opportunities to kill Bin Laden, and took none of them…

The conclusion seems unavoidable. The Islamic radicals made the decision to attack America on 9/11 because they decided that America was cowardly and weak. They came to this conclusion largely as a result of the actions—and inaction—of the Clinton administration and its allies on the left. What could have been done to get rid of Bin Laden and avert 9/11 was not done. In this sense liberal foreign policy gave radical Muslims the confidence and the opportunity to strike, and they did.

Quick! Better elect Hillary Clinton, who’s a lot more leftwing than Bill.

Feeling paranoid?

Jack Cashill does an awfully good Mel Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory impression feverishly linking the Berger document removal job with a cover-up of Clinton Administration knowledge of Operation Bojinka, along with an assumed cover-up by that Administration of the shooting down of TWA Flight 800 by a terrorist missile.

Interesting reading, at least.

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure. Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House Report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the House Committee, in fact, that Berger “indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review.”

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, “designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents.” Berger was Clinton’s go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor, not because of Berger’s foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. “The full extent of Berger’s document removal,” reports the House Committee, “is not known and never can be known.”

To understand what that “smoking gun” might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the “nuclear football” for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in “late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading “Operation Bojinka.”

As Patterson relates, “I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.” As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. “I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,” Patterson writes, “and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.” The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.

Understandably, the 9-11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked on her first real question: “Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?”

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the “knowledge about al-Qaeda having thought of using aircraft as weapons” was relatively old, “five-years, six-years old.” He asked that intelligence analysts “be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn’t seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.”

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam’s National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the President was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his hand written notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before September 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the “exit strategy” that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a “mechanical failure.” In his book Against All Enemies, he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied “wall” and work together on the creation of the notorious “zoom-climb” animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the “mechanical failure.” The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting—a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security advisor. Berger’s boss, the less “reliable” Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the “planes-as-bombs” talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger’s task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with hand-written notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke, and Clinton.

Ronald A. Cass, Chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law and Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, explains why the press has a responsibility to get to the bottom of Sandy Berger’s thefts from the National Archives.

Mr. Berger’s willingness to risk everything to suppress the information goes well beyond ordinary concerns against excessive disclosure.

Bill Clinton obviously has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al-Qaeda, that he is to some degree responsible for failing to prevent 9/11’s tragedy. That is why he and his lieutenants made reckless and baseless accusations against the current Bush administration, attempting to portray them as having dropped the baton handed off by ever-vigilant Clintonistas (who, according to John Ashcroft’s testimony, withheld the MAAAR and its warnings about al-Qaeda’s operations in the US from the Bush transition team).

But maybe there is more to the story. Maybe there is something far worse than we can imagine that is worth having his chief security aide risk his reputation, his career, and his liberty to cover up…

Clinton’s excessive reaction – complete with hyperbole, finger-wagging, and scolding – to a simple question from Fox News’ Chris Wallace about his response to al-Qaeda is in the same vein. Something here touches a nerve.

That nerve is exposed in the Sandy Berger saga. This story at bottom is about the security of our nation, about what was – or was not – done to protect us from the most shocking and deadly attack on American citizens by foreign agents in our nation’s history. This story is critical not only to understanding our past but also to securing our future. It can help us understand what it is reasonable to expect can be done to keep us and our loved ones safe from harm. It is, in short, as important a story as there is.

It is a story the news media should be desperate to explore, not desperate to avoid.

Clarice Feldman points out that the Department of Justice went out of its way to let Sandy Berger off easily for the document theft, and she think she knows why.

A particularly telling detail was the bit in the news reports of Berger’s treatment to the effect that DOJ sources insisted that “no original information” had been lost. That, of course, is simply the negative way of saying: All annotations to the original documents have been lost; we will never know for sure what the reactions of responsible members of the Clinton administration were to the contents of these highly important national security documents. Of course DOJ has always known this, as well as the significance of Berger’s conduct So, what interest did the prosecutors have in minimizing the seriousness of Berger’s crime–for crime it was, whatever the plea deal ultimately was? Or am I forgetting that the DOJ officials–the same ones who oversaw the start of Plamegate–have close ties to certain Democratic senators?

She is probably right, but an even more interesting question is what did the Clinton Administration papers in the National Archives reveal about that administration’s knowledge of terrorist threats and response that was so damaging that Sandy Berger was willing to undertake the risky task of trying to remove and destroy the evidence. The DOJ isn’t the only one giving Sandy Berger a pass. The MSM is curiously uninterested.

PJM has a link to the Inspector General’s Office report.

As today’s left screams its head off over the intolerable losses in Iraq, Gateway Pundit reminds us of the little-noticed fact that peace-time losses under Clinton were actually higher.

H/T to terrye.