The day of the nomination, McConnell spared Garland the trouble of a visit and gave him a pre-emptive call instead.
Despite Mr. Bush's brief treatment of the issue, the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign sent out campaign papers and e-mail messages about the proposals while the Democrats held a pre-emptive conference call for reporters with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, to criticize Mr. Bush before he made his remarks.
If that weren't enough, he does the critic's job, too, delivering a pre-emptive review, calling his work "contrived" and "thinly plotted".
A pre-emptive petition calling for studio Disney to avoid "whitewashing" the role of Mulan in its upcoming live-action remake of the 1998 animated tale has gathered more than 20,000 signatures.
"I'm getting lots of pre-emptive calls from corporate lawyers who know I specialize in corporate crime," said Martin R. Pollner, a former district attorney who practices at Loeb & Loeb.
Mr. Gore made a pre-emptive strike this week by calling on President Clinton to release some of the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Mr. Bush replied at once, accusing him of playing politics with a major element of national security.
So in what he calls a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Coppola fired a few people himself, including the assistant director.
Police arrested more than 1,200 people in what was called a "pre-emptive raid" on the warehouse where the rioters believed the killer worked, Russian news agencies reported.
Tensions have been running high since Indian aircraft crossed into Pakistan on Tuesday, carrying out what India called a pre-emptive strike against militants blamed for a 14 February suicide bombing that killed 40 Indian troops.
Page A7 IRAQ ARRESTS ACTIVISTS Iraqi security forces arrested more than a dozen activists over the past week in a sweep that rights groups called a pre-emptive strike to prevent a flickering reform movement from reviving.
BAGHDAD — Iraqi security forces arrested more than a dozen activists here over the past week in a sweep that rights groups called a pre-emptive strike to prevent a flickering reform movement from springing back to life.
