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How many SNAFUs should one person get in life?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/30/politics/30LAZI.html
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The Republican State Committee said yesterday that its telephone campaign on behalf of Rick A. Lazio's Senate bid would no longer include calls that referred to the bombing of the destroyer Cole to try to suggest that some of Hillary Rodham Clinton's donors supported terrorism.
The calls including that reference, which Mrs. Clinton had harshly criticized as politicizing a tragedy, ended sometime Saturday after the party's chairman, William D. Powers, determined that the script had run its course, not because of the criticism, a spokesman for Mr. Powers said.
The spokesman, Dan Allen, said Mr. Powers believed that it had reached enough voters, though he could not provide an estimate of how many people had been called. Altogether, a broader telephone campaign, which began Thursday and was to continue for an undisclosed time, was expected to reach 500,000 people. State party officials say the phone campaign will continue with other calls, including some aimed at Jewish voters, that question Mrs. Clinton's commitment to Israel.
Mrs. Clinton, campaigning in Rochester with Senator Charles E. Schumer, said the decision to end the calls referring to the Cole bombing was not good enough. She repeated her demand of Saturday that Mr. Lazio and the Republican Party "do the honorable thing and apologize." Mr. Lazio refused on Saturday and then again yesterday, saying the Clinton campaign was trying to deflect attention from questionable donations.
"That is so typical," Mrs. Clinton said of the Republican decision. "They should have stopped the calls yesterday when they were caught making those calls. They should clearly take responsibility, as should Mr. Lazio. I believe both Congressman Lazio and the state Republican Party still owe an apology to the families that lost their sons and daughters and loved ones on the U.S.S. Cole."
Both Jews and non-Jews have received calls. The pitch to non-Jews included a line saying Mrs. Clinton accepted money from an organization that "openly brags about its support for a Mideast terrorism group - the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the U.S.S. Cole."
The reference is to contributions Mrs. Clinton accepted from leaders of the American Muslim Alliance at a fund-raiser in Boston in June. Mrs. Clinton returned the money, $50,000, after learning that the group's leader was quoted as defending a United Nations resolution he interpreted as allowing Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. American investigators say the Oct. 12 explosion on the Cole, which killed 17 sailors, was most likely caused by terrorists, but they have not linked the blast to any organization.
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