President Clinton has taken a break from delivering paid speeches to pen a fundraising letter for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee that is chaired by Senator Schumer — “my friend Senator Chuck Schumer” is how Mr. Clinton puts it. Boy is it a piece of work. A copy of the letter shared with The New York Sun charges that Republicans “chose to abuse their power to satisfy the agenda of their most extreme followers. Now we have fighting men and women pinned down in a civil war in Iraq.”

Well let the record show that Mr. Schumer voted for that war in the Senate. As for Mr. Clinton, as recently as 2004 he told Time magazine that he “supported the Iraq thing,” prompting a Washington Post headline that read in part, “Clinton Backs Bush on Iraq War.” CNN reported his comments in June of 2004 by saying, “Former President Clinton has revealed that he continues to support President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”

If now Messrs. Clinton and Schumer believe that America’s presence in Iraq amounts to being in the middle of a civil war, they both have some explaining to do for their prior positions. The “civil war” charge was used against Mr. Clinton by those who opposed American military involvement in the Balkans. It’s an old isolationist saw, and if it were a foreign policy rule never to get in the middle of a civil war, the French never would have helped the patriots win the American Revolution.

The letter goes on to make a series of complaints about supposed budget cuts made to fund what Mr. Clinton calls “huge tax cuts.” “With evidence that the crime rate’s going up, I think it was a mistake to give me tax cuts and get rid of the COPS program, which put over 100,000 police officers on the street,” the letter says. It turns out, though, that the most reliable measure of crime, the homicide rate, has been essentially flat nationwide from 2000 to 2005. As for Mr. Clinton’s claim that four years of Republican rule decimated the nation’s police forces, data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the total employees at the federal, local, and state levels devoted to police protection soared to 1,120,040 in March 2004 from the 1,040,708 who were on the payrolls in March 2000, the last year Clinton was in office.

“I think it was a mistake to give me huge tax cuts but cut college aid at a time when the cost of college education is going through the roof,” Mr. Clinton writes. This is another false accusation. According to statistics from the federal department of education, appropriations for spending on post-secondary education in the department of education’s budget have soared to $24.8 billion in 2007, up from the measly $11 billion Mr. Clinton had brought it to by 2000. That is the budget that includes major financial aid and loan programs, such as Pell grants, on which Mr. Bush’s 2008 budget proposed spending $15.4 billion, more than double the $7.5 billion for which Mr. Clinton asked in his 2000 budget.

The error that tax cuts must translate into spending cuts is classic Democratic Party socialistic static analysis. The economic growth set off by the Bush tax cuts has sent federal revenues to new heights, a phenomenon that Mr. Clinton might recall from his own experience with cutting the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 28% back in 1997. The amount of capital gains tax collected by the federal government soared to $127 billion in 2000 from $66 billion in 1996, evidence that a rate cut can more than pay for itself.

The letter concludes with the bitter, partisan language that so many people find so off-putting about Messrs. Clinton and Schumer and their circle. “The other side has done a lot to obscure what’s important in our national debate,” it says. In the realm of obscuring things, this fundraising appeal itself is right up there. The pitch is for contributors to assist the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in funding what it is calling the “Media Response Project.” The letter promises, “We will use the media to get the truth out.” Well, we are happy to have been of service, although perhaps not in precisely the way Messrs. Clinton and Schumer intended.