LIMBAUGH COMMENTARY: BILL CLINTON'S MASK OF COMPASSION

On Friday, Bill Clinton announced that he would convene a White House summit on youth violence on May 10. In his opening remarks, after briefly relating how much time he had spent in the last week agonizing over the Littleton massacre, he conducted a clinic on that skill for which he has become legendary: compartmentalization.

Unable to resist a self-congratulatory detour, in a textbook sociopathic performance he said, "Let me begin by saying we got some more good news today on the economic front with the word that our economy expanded by 4.5 percent in the first quarter of this year."

Getting back to the obligatory subject of student killings, he asked, "What can we do to give our children safe, whole childhoods?" He added, "We should not be fighting about who takes the blame."

As accomplished a fibber as he is, the president must have forgotten, or assumed we had forgotten, about his NRA-blaming comment earlier this week: "It's not just the culture of violence that has to change. It's the culture of hunting and sport shooting that has to stop financing efforts to frighten their members who are good, God-fearing, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens out there into believing that every time we try to save a kid's life it's a camel's nose in the tent."

Not only is Clinton blaming the NRA, he is exploiting the tragedy for political gain. He even admits that he is counting on the outrage over the shootings to help push his new gun-control proposal through Congress. White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said, "Unfortunately, oftentimes it takes tragic events to catalyze work here in Washington."

If Clinton is genuinely concerned about our children's safety, then why is he convening a summit about child murders, the ultimate solution for which cannot come from government initiatives?

Instead, why isn't he taking aggressive action in a matter where government action can make a difference and has played a role: Chinese theft of our deadly nuclear technology? If he were sincere about wanting to give our children "safe, whole childhoods," wouldn't he be leaving no stone unturned in this investigation?

The fact that his administration has stonewalled the congressional investigation instead of cooperating not only gives the lie to his feigned concern for the children, but shows he has something to hide.

Couldn't Clinton just one time in his self-absorbed political career truly put the interests of other people above his own by leading the charge to find out how our secrets could have been stolen? Why doesn't he call a summit on this?

The reason is that Clinton has everything to fear from full disclosure. Everyone knows that his China-cash-guzzling administration, from Reno to Berger to Clinton, virtually protected prime suspect Wen Ho Lee, who has been under investigation for nearly three years as a suspected spy for China. Don't fall for the administration's excuse that earlier action wouldn't have mattered.

The New York Times reports that last November the top officials of the administration received a secret report warning that China posed an acute intelligence threat to the government's nuclear-weapons laboratories and that computer systems at the labs were being constantly penetrated by outsiders. Yet it wasn't until March that they searched Lee's Los Alamos computer. The Energy Department waited until April to shut down its classified computer systems to impose tighter security over the data.

In February, while the ever-compassionate Bill Clinton was sitting on his hands, Lee tried to delete evidence that he had improperly transferred more than 1,000 files containing nuclear secrets.

This is just one example of this administration's gross negligence (or worse) involving our nuclear secrets. Other examples could fill up scores of columns like this one. We can hope we'll get a more complete picture later this month with the release of the Cox Report. But we already know that today's most menacing evil empire, Red China, may have stolen almost all of our nuclear secrets, saving them a half-century in their nuclear program and exposing us to a much greater threat of nuclear annihilation.

We can have all the feel-good government-sponsored summits we want to about the evils of the NRA and media violence, but we better get serious about one of the few things the Framers intended for the government to have everything to do with: our national security. Until this administration shows an interest in getting to the bottom of this China mess, we can be sure that Clinton is more interested in protecting himself than our children.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.