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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (101149)	2/19/2005 9:08:53 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793843

SNEER ALERT [Tim Graham] Lest you think that liberals don't speak out in public about how the al-Qaeda threat is a trumped-up paper tiger for more defense dollars like the Red Menace, there's always Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe. "Al-Qaeda Has Replaced the Soviet Union as the Great Boogeyman" Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant Washington, DC-based Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant, a former political reporter for the New York Times-owned newspaper, on Thursday morning haughtily dismissed any threat the Soviet Union once posed or al-Qaeda now poses. Commenting on MSNBC about how FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director Porter Goss said that al-Qaeda intends to strike the U.S. again, Oliphant asserted: "The only thing that makes sense to me is this is mid-February, it's budget cycle, and al-Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union as the great boogeyman, and you need to say it five or six or seven times to make sure your budget is as big as possible." That's right, the Soviet communists who enslaved millions, invaded nations and aimed nuclear missiles at us was nothing more than a "boogeyman" used by conservatives to unnecessarily boost defense spending. The MRC's Jessica Barnes caught the exchange in the 7:30am half hour of Thursday's Imus in the Morning on which Oliphant appeared by phone. Don Imus: "Well, we've just been informed now by Porter Goss and, I guess, the Secretary of Defense that al-Qaeda is still a big threat." Tom Oliphant: "And the head of the FBI, too." Imus: "Yeah." Oliphant: "You know, it was sort of a wild day in Congress yesterday. What I think was happening is that everybody was getting ready for a week's vacation, and they were sort of loading up the news cycle. My view of what happened yesterday – you know, Mueller was there, too, from the FBI -- and the only thing that makes sense to me is this is mid-February, it's budget cycle, and al-Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union as the great boogeyman, and you need to say it five or six or seven times to make sure your budget is as big as possible, and all these budgets are exploding. Not counting Iraq, I think military now is way over $400 billion, as much as the rest of the world combined, I think, and to my ears anyway, I listened pretty carefully yesterday, I didn't hear one syllable of new information about al-Qaeda yesterday at all, but every one of these guys -- Rumsfeld, Porter Goss, Mueller -- all of them have big, huge budgets pending in Congress, and so it's time to get scared." mrc.org