DUPE!

Wesley Clark Lobbied Bush Administration for Contract for Arkansas Firm to Get Security Work

NEW YORK, Jan. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- As an Arkansas businessman, Wesley Clark lobbied Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, aides to FBI Director Robert Mueller and his former chief deputy commander in Europe on behalf of a company eager to get post-9/11 security work, Newsweek reports in the current issue. The aim: to get a contract for Acxiom, a Little Rock firm whose "data mining" techniques are useful in tracking terrorists.

The lobbying -- for which Clark was paid about $400,000 -- must have helped: Acxiom got a contract. Everything was aboveboard and disclosed, says Chris Lehane, who does opposition research for Clark. But Clark's eagerness to do a deal was ironic, given his more recent criticism of the Bush administration's handling of security, report Chief Political Correspondent Howard Fineman and Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the January 26 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 19). And the Howard Dean campaign, furious at weeks of attacks on their own candidate, took the occasion to fire at will. "Clark portrays himself as an outsider when he's really just another Washington insider," says Dean spokesman Jay Carson. "It turns out that this guy was a registered lobbyist long before he was a registered Democrat."

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http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040118/nysu014a_1.html

What's the big deal?

We do need to consider how the Bushistas are going to go after the Dem candidate. Valid or not, there's a lot of stuff which the Bushistas can pull out on Clark and say 'see, he supported us and our policies until recently.' I'm not judging Clark here, just talking process.

Instead of rolling your eyes and saying 'why you bringing up old stuff?', y'all best be gettin' ready for the electorate to begin looking at stuff the media puts on their plates that many of us have already been digesting here for a long time.

Yup. It hasn't hardly even begun yet for TV Nation. Be ready with your counter-arguments and justifications so we can all win in '04.

Oh, and...Robert F. Kennedy for Prez!
Ah, that felt good...now back to reality, such as it is...