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Why had Shelton repeated the White House line, when the missile threat was so real? “He just does whatever the president tells him to do, as opposed to concerning himself with the nation’s defense,” Inhofe says today. “He defends the president more than the nation.”

Unfortunately for Shelton, the missile blowup came hard on the heels of his participation in what many Republicans viewed as the most irresponsible episode of the wag-the-dog summer of 1998. On August 20, with the country and the press in an uproar over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton ordered cruise-missile attacks on suspected terrorist installations in Sudan and Afghanistan. The targets were so poorly chosen, and the results so minimal, that many Republicans conclude that Clinton must have been trying to divert attention from the scandal.

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Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributing editor.

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Why had Shelton repeated the White House line, when the missile threat was so real? “He just does whatever the president tells him to do, as opposed to concerning himself with the nation’s defense,” Inhofe says today. “He defends the president more than the nation.”

Unfortunately for Shelton, the missile blowup came hard on the heels of his participation in what many Republicans viewed as the most irresponsible episode of the wag-the-dog summer of 1998. On August 20, with the country and the press in an uproar over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton ordered cruise-missile attacks on suspected terrorist installations in Sudan and Afghanistan. The targets were so poorly chosen, and the results so minimal, that many Republicans conclude that Clinton must have been trying to divert attention from the scandal.