"President Bush (news - web sites) on Monday accused John Kerry (news - web sites) of having proposed "deeply irresponsible" cuts in intelligence spending just two years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, part of a re-election effort to depict his Democratic rival as weak on national security and the war against terrorism.
Bush, during a fund-raiser in Dallas, called attention to a 1995 bill that Kerry sponsored to trim intelligence spending by $1.5 billion over five years. The cut was part of what Kerry called a "budget-buster bill" to strip $90 billion from the budget and end 40 programs that he said were "pointless, wasteful, antiquated or just plain silly."
Kerry's proposal, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and calls for a peace dividend after decades of spending to thwart the Cold War opponent, never came up for a vote.
"This bill was so deeply irresponsible that it didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate," Bush said.
"Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways," Bush said, one of the few times recently he has mentioned his rival by name. "He's for good intelligence, and yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services, and that is no way to lead in a time of war."
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