Veto power makes lame duck relevant
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The dying months of the disastrous Bush presidency are beginning to resemble the twilight of the Clinton administration.
Both presidents have had to plaintively proclaim they were still "relevant" even as their epitaphs were being written.
Both presidents belatedly looked for a solution to the perennial Israeli-Palestinian problem to put a feather in their foreign-policy caps.
On that score, President Clinton struck out big time and petulantly put all the blame on the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Clinton supported a plan by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for Palestinian enclaves to be surrounded by Israeli checkpoints, making a mockery of Palestinian sovereignty. It would have been perilous for any Palestinian leader to accept that plan.
The failure of the peace talks was a blow for Clinton, who gambled on a last bid to add a Middle East triumph to his fading presidency.
President Bush is in the same boat.
Bush repeatedly brags that he is the first president to endorse a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.
But he has done nothing except give it lip service and has been so pro-Israeli that the U.S. cannot act as an "honest broker" between the two. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is frantically trying to pull together a Middle East peace conference in November.
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