Day: October 15, 2006

Former President Bill Clinton told Iowa’s Democratic Party faithful on Saturday that the actions of “an extreme sliver” of the Republican Party have backfired and “profoundly divided” the country.

“We’ve got a big responsibility. Forget about 2008. Forget about the politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say ‘You know, this is not right’…This is America,” Clinton said. “We can do better and this year, it’s a job that Democrats have to do alone.”

Rep. John Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran who favors withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, wrote an essay for Sunday’s Washington Post blasting Republicans for referring to him and other Iraq war opponents as “Defeatocrats.”

In his opinion piece, first published on the Post’s Web site Saturday night, Murtha, D-Pa., said Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others in the White House have called Iraq war opponents appeasers and pessimists and labeled Democrats the “cut and run” party.

President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

Former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts Democrat who was censured in 1983 for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old congressional intern, died on Saturday at Boston Medical Center, an official said.

Christian Kiriakos, the hospital’s central administrator, said Studds, 69, died Saturday morning but did not provide details on the cause of his death.