Senator Clinton, dropping her recent attempts at moderation, launched a scathing attack on Washington Republicans yesterday, lambasting President Bush as someone who sold out America’s economic viability to the government of China and accusing congressional Republicans of making the House of Representatives a GOP dictatorship.

Mrs. Clinton delivered those and other broadsides at a breakfast held at the New York Hilton hotel by the New York Women for Hillary, a $210-a-seat fund-raising event that organizers said attracted more than 1,000 people and generated about $250,000 for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for re-election in 2006. New York’s junior senator is also considered to be a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

The former first lady unleashed, before an enthusiastic audience, several criticisms of her husband’s successor, assailing the Bush administration for racking up large deficits that she said imperil America’s economy and sovereignty.

“We’re living on borrowed time and borrowed money,” Mrs. Clinton said, denouncing the administration for borrowing billions of dollars from Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and particularly China.

When she is asked why the American government allows many jobs to be outsourced to China, and when people ask why Washington doesn’t “get tougher on China” for not respecting international labor and trade standards, Mrs. Clinton said she replies: “How do you get tough on your banker?”

The Bush administration “is giving up fiscal sovereignty” to the Beijing government, “a horrible position to be in,” she said.

To the editor of the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Mrs. Clinton’s scolding of Mr. Bush rang hypocritical.

“She’s actually in no position to pop off and lecture anybody on how to deal with the Chinese or discipline the Chinese,” Mr. Tyrrell said. His publication has been one of the most persistent in criticizing Mrs. Clinton and her husband, especially during his presidency. The Clintons have been accused of various inappropriate connections to Red China.

Mr. Tyrrell – who also writes a weekly column that appears in The New York Sun – mentioned in particular the Clintons’ ties to the Riady family, an Indonesian clan with ties to the Chinese communist government through their financial conglomerate, the Lippo Group. In 1999, two major Clinton fund-raisers, John Huang and Charles Yah Lin Trie, pleaded guilty to charges related to the illegal funneling of Chinese contributions to Mr. Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996. In 1998, a Clinton fund-raiser connected to the Riady family and Mr. Huang, Maria Hsia, was indicted on charges related to a fund-raising event held with Vice President Gore at a Buddhist temple in Southern California. Perhaps most damaging, Mr. Tyrrell said, was how President Clinton allegedly allowed for the transfer, through the defense contractors Loral and Hughes, of secret military technology to the Chinese government.

“Hillary seems to think everyone in America suffers from amnesia, but we can remember their close relations with China,” Mr. Tyrrell said, explaining that both Clintons were beholden to the Chinese government.

“I suppose Hillary is in a fine position to talk about the Chinese being America’s backers,” he said. “After all, the Chinese in ’96 were the funders for her husband’s campaign.”

Much of Mrs. Clinton’s speech yesterday, however, was dedicated to arguing the memory loss of Republicans in Washington, who, she claimed, have forgotten how the institutions of government are supposed to function.

Bewailing a lack of civilized bipartisanship, Mrs. Clinton excoriated Republicans for turning the House into “basically a dictatorship of the Republican leadership.” She also blamed the GOP for running the country based on ideology instead of truth, evidence, and fact, all of which, she said, they dismissed as “inconvenient.”

When asked why Democrats can’t do more to stop Republicans, Mrs. Clinton said she responds: “It’s very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they’re doing. It’s very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.”

Winning elections, the senator said, was the most important way to keep Republicans at bay, and she urged her New York audience to donate to and assist Democratic campaigns in other states, particularly Senate races against incumbent Republicans, “especially in Pennsylvania.” There, Senator Santorum, a bogeyman to the left for his staunch social conservatism, faces a serious challenge to his re-election next year. Mrs. Clinton’s mention of the Pennsylvania race met with enthusiastic applause.

She was also enthusiastically applauded when she denounced the press as insufficiently tough on the Bush administration.

“The press is missing in action, with all due respect,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Pointing to the recent unveiling of Watergate legend Deep Throat as an FBI official, W. Mark Felt, Mrs. Clinton expressed frustration that reporters weren’t investigating the Bush administration in the way that they pursued President Nixon’s misdeeds.

“Where are all the investigative reporters today?” she asked, suggesting that they look into the alleged $9 billion of spending on the Iraq war that the Bush administration cannot account for.

In the meantime, the senator’s concerns were focused on the president’s judicial nominees, particularly Janice Rogers Brown, a woman “who truly sees the world in 19th-century terms” and “a person who never should have been nominated to federal court,” in Mrs. Clinton’s view.

Where her husband’s administration had wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century, she said, “This administration wants to build a bridge to the 19th century.”