The USA in Bill Clinton’s Time 1993-2001
by Mike Donovan
CONTENTS
Overview of the Clinton Era
Clinton Cabinet
Bio
Election 1992
Slick Willie
Crime Soft
Winner's Circle
Honeymoon
Legacy Place
Motor Voter
Stimulus Package
Missile Strike on Iraq 6.93
Triple M Mezvinski
Chickenhawk Down
Rwanda
Troopergate 12 93
$200 Haircut
Fort Marcy Park 7 20 93
Whitewater Mistake
Enter Dick Morris
Elections of 1994
Mr. Irrelevant
OK City
Welfare Reform Act 1995
Khobar Towers 6 25 96
TWA 800 July 17 1996
Mysterious Al Kaida
Unlimited Access 8 96
Election of 1996 – Overview
DNC and Lyndon Larouche
RNC 1996
Ross Perot
Old Man
Results
Dick Departs
Excelsior & Jeopardy
The Willies
The Big Bimbo
Juanita
Croatia
Judge Susan Webber and Reaction
Verdict
Walters ABC Exclusive!
Tears
Grand Funk Hamzy
Move On
A Ken Starr is Born
Livingston Out, We Presume
Egypt Air 990 10-31-99
Russia and Strobe Light
Chinese Embassy Bombing 5-7-99
The Economy
Iraq – Overview
Iraq Liberation Act
Clinton Timing Bombs
Attack on USS Cole
Morris Again
Pardon the Rich
The Fingerman
Hillary
Actor in the White House
TR Gets the Medal of Honor
The Middle East
After Office
Conclusion
Sources
THE USA IN THE TIME OF BILL CLINTON
“I Feel Your Pain” - Monica’s “sexual soul-mate” - Blythe Spirit - Slick Willie – The 3 Kings – Black Hawk Down - Bosnia - Monica Lewinski – FOB/AFB - Huge basketball fan – “Bimbo eruptions” – Troopergate – Travelgate - Monicagate – “Two For the Price of One” – ‘Billary’ - Whitewater
Defeated incumbent George Bush by a score of 370 to 168 - then clobbered Bob Dole in 96 by a similar score.
Popular Vote 1992
Bill Clinton D) 44,909,000
George Bush R) 39,103,000
H Ross Perot ..) 19,741,000
Andre Marrou L) 291,000
Sherman Hemsley CD) 34,000
“I won a lot of elections and I think I did a lot of good, but the more I tried to bring people together, the madder it made the fanatics on the right.”
Bill Clinton
I can never make up my mind about this guy. I hate him sometimes, only dislike him at other, and sometimes if I read a really good book by one of his literate defenders, I have a spell where I think I have been wrong all these years and that he's really a great guy. Those spells don't last too long, and I come back to disliking him again.
Was Bill Clinton ever guilty of sexual assault? Was every woman who accused him of sexual assault a liar? If even one was telling the truth, then “wow.” If all of them were completely lying, then “wow” also. There is nothing in the Constitution that says a President convicted of sexual assault should be impeached and removed from power, but it surely pertinent to any assessment of the guy as a person and as a President. Who can look up to “The Comeback Kid” if Juanita or Paula were telling the truth?
Clinton was a president who was able but not admirable. His heart was usually in the right place but he wasn't ruled by his heart.
Clinton, according to his 4.2 million page autobiography is always the victim. Anyone who disagrees with anything he does, says, or proposes, is a right-wing fanatic. The charges are ignored, only the source is attacked. Clinton’s critics are demons, never decent well-meaning people who happen to have a different way of seeing things. His idea of ‘bringing people together’ is getting them all to agree with all his political opinions and decisions on everything. And if they don’t fall in line with each part of his biased agenda they then represent disunity and are ‘fanatics.’
I don't buy the “unity” stuff, no matter how centrist he supposedly was. Every partisan in the history of the planet advocates “unity.” Ho Chi Minh’s wanted a “united’ Vietnam. Yes united in victory with all opponents properly crushed. Funny thing, I want a united America too. I want all Americans to support my favorite candidate, and my favorite policies. This way we will no longer be divided. If his opponents win, he would then have to come out in favor of the nation returning to disunity. ‘Bringing people together’ is low rhetoric.
Bill Clinton always showed off his tears and always ostentatiously displayed physical affection for his wife and daughter for the cameras. No president in history physically showed off his loving family guy image and no president ever disrespected these roles in actual personal practice. He always walked off the helicopter holding hands with Hillary and Chelsea, or stood at an important event with his arms ostentatiously around both of them. How could he live with himself in such public poses when he knew full well what his real behavior was?
Look at Mr. warm and fuzzy huggy-bear from the hippie love and peace era ... making it with every bimbo that came down the pike.
Bill Jeff beat George Bush and Ross Perot in 92 while taking only 43% of the popular vote. Clinton was the second president to be impeached and the second one acquitted (Andrew Johnson was the first.) Congress impeached Clinton primarily for lies and evasions he told to a Grand Jury. The Senate acquitted him.
10 million less votes were cast in the 1996 presidential election than in 1992. Clinton had such a lead on Dole in the polls that people knew on both sides of it that there was no contest. People on other planets knew that Dole was going to lose.
Many conservative authors today criticize Clinton for not having used enough military force, or at least the threat of it, in foreign policy; that the United States is still repairing he damage he did to the nation's foreign policy. In response to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 Bill only half-heartedly sent some useless cruise missiles into the Sudan and Afghanistan. Then he lost in the Black Hawk Down conflict in Somalia, and he never took a tough enough stand against Sadaam for defying UN weapons inspectors.
Conservatives are unfair in these charges for this reason. Clinton was a Democrat. He reached out in the conservative direction a great deal in taking any military action in these theatres. Many Democrats are against any use of force in US foreign policy. A McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis or Kucinich Democrat might have given the nation the only thing even more dangerous than militarism, pacifism.
Conservatives could have done worse on foreign policy out of the field of Democrats. The guy even won a war in the Balkans without a single KIA after 500 experts warned him that it couldn’t be done without ground troops. Before we rip him for his foreign policy it’s fair to say that he made an attempt to move towards the center by at least combining some amount of military force with political force.
Bill Clinton was a hard-worker with exceptional brains. Clinton had a lot of energy and plenty of leadership skills. I do not question the sincerity of his religious faith nor his sincere devotion to many social issues.
But I don’t buy the smile. I don’t buy the laugh. I think he is a scrappy purely political animal and a dirty-fighter who deep down inside is all wolf, and not just sexually. His four hour-grand jury testimony was a disgrace to the national honor.
Having said all that, I have read enough in recent years to realize that there is some truth to the charge that the right was out to get Clinton and used every low down dirty cheap trick in the book to maximize and exaggerate the scandals in order to render him ineffective.
But I draw the line at Juanita Broderick. If this man was exposing himself and forcing himself on women with or without their permission because he knew he had a big powerful protection machine to get him out of trouble, then he should have not only been impeached, he should have been prosecuted. He made a mockery out of the institution of marriage and betrayed the hippie love values he supposedly rode in on. The Republicans were supposedly insensitive and didn't care about values the way he and his Democrats did, and then we discover that his personal behavior made Reagan and both Bushes look like John the Baptist by comparison.
Hopefully he promoted policies in the big picture that superseded his personal conduct.
Clinton’s cabinet
Secretary of State-------------Warren Christopher
Madeline Albright
Secretary of Defense--------Les Aspin
Secretary of Commerce….Ron Brown (died in plane crash)
Attorney General ……… Janet Reno
Secretary of Labor ……. Robert Reich
BIO
Bill Clinton was born on August 19, 1946 (one month after George W. Bush) in Hope, Arkansas. His father died in a terrible car crash before William was born. All fatal car crashes are terrible, but the poor man rolled his car into a cold ditch and his body was found with one hand reaching above the water. That's especially terrible.
Bill's mother was named Virginia. She was the daughter of the local iceman (not the one in the New Jersey prison,) and a nurse who specialized in anesthesiology.
Among the adults that young Clinton admired was a black housemaid named Odessa, a lady who had, as he recalls in his memoir, ‘a beautiful smile.’ One day his mother asked him if he liked Odessa as more than just a friend. His response was predictable in retrospect. Bill told Virginia as she recalled it later,
“I want to make one thing very clear and I am only going to say this once. I did not .. have .. sexual relations with that woman, Miss Odessa. I never told Odessa to lie. Never. And now I want to get back to the business of my homework. This family has been distracted by this issue long enough.”
His mother then met and married Roger Clinton. Billy and Virginia adopted the new last name.
The Clintons moved to Hot Springs Arkansas when he was six. The family lived at 216 Summers Street until Billy was 15. Hot Springs was a party-town and a half. This was no Hope, this was hopeless, a sizzling vivacious hotbed of gambling, dancing, pimps, comedy clubs, mobsters, and a lot of other bad things. Clinton later loved to campaign as the poor kid who had to go to an outhouse in a simple home in “a place called Hope.” But he spent the 'Wonder Years' in a place called Hot Springs. None of this ever came up on the campaign trail, but it was Hot, not Hope that most helped to shape his personality.
Father Roger Clinton had a major drinking problem. How much did his father drink? More than you're thinking.
In 1955 Rog became father to a new baby boy he named Junior. Roger Jr. inherited both the Roger Clinton name and the substance abuse problem. In 1992 President Clinton cited his brother’s recovery from addiction as a reason he did not favor the legalization of recreational drugs.
Young Billy was always insecure about being chubby, and he was not very good at standing up to the various bullies in his various schools. One jerk at a swimming hole hit Billy in the temple with a rock and drew blood. Clinton thought about swimming over and fighting him but instead swam away. He claims in his memoir that he was afraid to get angry because he associated angry behavior with his drunken father and did not want to emulate him.
That's lame. I ducked a few childhood fights, but I don’t claim that I had a superior motive for doing so.
Clinton was a ‘band-boy.’ He studied music, and his many years of saxophone lessons paid off in the 1992 campaign on, of all places, the Arsenio Hall Show.
Clinton senior sometimes abused the wife when he drank. One day, when the future president was about 14, Roger Sr. began hitting Mrs. Clinton in the bedroom. Young Billy overheard this, and, grabbing a golf club, entered the bedroom and threatened to beat the old man if he didn’t stop. The father backed down, as bullies often do when confronted with a golf club.
In 1963 BC was a member of the American Legion Boys Nation. This was a little fake government that walked boys through the rituals and procedures of government. ALBN elected boy state senators and boy governors. Clinton ran for Boys Nation Senator from the State of Arkansas, and campaigned hard. He met every boy in Boys Nation, got to know their likes and dislikes. He stood outside school cafeterias at six a.m. like a grown man campaigning for his political life. Clinton won.
Boy Clinton traveled to Washington DC with many other “senators” and “governors.” They were even going to meet President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. Clinton knew he was bigger and more assertive than the other boys. He was determined that if Kennedy shook only one or two hands, he would be one of them. Clinton was a boy in a man's body, (and would maintain that formula at times when he became President) and when Kennedy approached the boys on the White House lawn Bill made his forward move to shake Kennedy’s hand. The two philanderers shook hands and the photograph is now famous. You can see it is Bill saying something to Kennedy, not the other way around.
Bill Clinton continued to focus on music through high school. He joined a school band called the Stardusters, and later became part of a jazz trio called ‘The 3 Kings.’
Clinton went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. where he was a classmate of Lucy Johnson, the President's daughter. That's as in the President of the United States, not of Georgetown. Clinton won the Presidency of his freshman and sophomore class. Junior Bill declined to run for class president, but it was only because he was now more politically active, not less. He was hanging around on Capitol Hill and making himself useful as an intern of sorts on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His idol, Senator Fullbright was a leading member of the SFR. Bill was learning anti-Vietnam war opinions from the best.
Clinton won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University against some serious competition. He set sail from New York on October 4 1968 on the USS United States. He had an affair on the bon voyage with a miss Martha Saxton, who later wrote a successful book, Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America.
Clinton never graduated from Oxford. He has several pages of excuse towel for this failure. In any case we can give him credit for being a brilliant scholar if he made it as far as winning a Rhodes scholarship.
At Oxford in 1968 Bill landed on the bull's eye in the middle of the anti-war sixties. He uses his autobiography My Life to write an overlapping political polemic on the American history he was experiencing. He says, for example, that Nixon would have lost the election of 1968 if only Humphrey had used the dirt he had on the Republicans. But Humphry was a good person and Nixon was evil, so Humphry didn't use the dirt, whereas if it were reversed, “Nixon would have used it in a heartbeat.”
While at Oxford Clinton “tried marijuana a few times but never inhaled.” This was what he claimed during the presidential campaigns when asked about drug use. Why his friends would let this slide is not clear. The stuff costs money and that's just wasting it.
While at Cambridge, WJC took a forty-day train tour of eastern Europe. Bill visited Finland and Sweden first, then went on to Moscow in the dead of winter, just after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia at the height of the Cold War.
The trip to Commie country became a hot topic late in the race for president in 1992. Congressman Bob Dornan among others questioned his patriotism as well as the money trail. How did he get the money to travel to four countries for six weeks?. A trip to Moscow alone would have eaten up more than his annual stipend as a Rhodes scholar. The book Boy Clinton questions how he could have afforded such a trip on his Fullbright scholarship since the trip alone would be twice the cost of the full scholarship.
Clinton organized and led anti-Vietnam War demonstrations while in England. The righties call them anti-American demonstrations but I wouldn't. The demonstrators admittedly had a Blame America First attitude but the War was undeniably a mess so it’s oversimplifying it a bit to say that Clinton was participating in demonstrations against his country. He was protesting against the Vietnam War, not America in general, and it was the in thing to do at the time. Being an anti-war hippie was also a good way to score with hippie women.
In 1974 Bill Clinton ran for Congress from Arkansas against incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. JPH was very conservative, a perfect opponent for a Vietnam war protester. But “The Hammer” won by carrying 52% of the vote in a year where the country was back-lashing against the party of Nixon.
Bill then taught law for two years at the University of Arkansas.
Clinton won election to the office of Attorney General for the state of Arkansas. In that role he was responsible for prosecuting many people who committed less serious crimes than those he got away with while president.
In 1978 Clinton ran for governor of Arkansas. When he won he was the youngest governor in America since 1938 when Harold Stassen was the 31 year old governor of Minnesota. (Stassen ran against Clinton in 1996!)
Clinton lost to Republican Frank White (not the former Kansas City Royals infielder) in 1980 and retired to private law practice, joining the firm of Wright, Lindsey, Lashua, and Jennings. Lindsey is the later famous Bruce Lindsey, closest advisor to President Clinton after Hillary, the closest thing to a Harry Hopkins in the Clinton era. When Clinton lost in 1980 he became the youngest ex-governor in American history (as he bragged for the rest of his life – he also had the nerve to refer to himself repeatedly while in his late 40’s as ‘the Comeback Kid.’)
One of the reason's Clinton lost his governor's seat was 'car-tags.' He doubled them. Hundreds of poor people drove to the Arkansas DMV to renew their licenses and discovered that they didn't have enough money. They had to drive back home, borrow some money and come back and renew their license. Several sources cite 'car-tags' as one of the big issues that brought him down at Little Rock.
Challenger Clinton ran a smart campaign to make it back to the state capitol. He ran TV ads where he said he was sorry that he had raised license fees, and if the voters gave him another chance he would never be that insensitive to the concerns of the working class ever again. It worked. He beat incumbent Governor Frank White in 1982 and regained Little Rock. White failed to win a second term. White just couldn't turn the double play. Clinton won re-election in 1984 a 64% landslide vote.
In 86 Clinton was easily re-elected again, and this time the governor's term was extended from two to four years. He of course had been in favor of this new law. In 1990 BC ruled Arkansas for the fourth time, pledging during the campaign to finish out the term and not run for president in 1992. There was strong speculation in a major piece in the Wall Street Journal that he might do so. Reporters repeatedly asked if he was really just lining up his state as a launching pad for the Presidency. Finally he snapped, pointed his finger and said, “ I want you to listen to me cause I'm not going to say this again. I am not ...going...to run... for President in 1992.”
Clinton's first national exposure came over the issue of teacher testing in Arkansas. Most of the teacher unions were against it, of course. Unions look out for their own, right or wrong. So what if some teach well, and some badly. Keep them all employed and pay them all the same! Protect your own, that's all. Soon Clinton was on major TV talk shows like Donahue, Oprah, and Claude talking about the need to test teachers.
(On that issue I say test them till they can't see straight. Let's let's see how they like the pressure of passing a test, just like their pupils. I never loved a teacher. These touching movies about beloved teachers are from some planet I never walked on. I didn't hate any teachers either, ... well maybe except for two nuns, but we don't want to slow the book down with that one!)
Most of America got its first glimpse of the perma-smile windbag when Clinton gave a speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The speech in praise of Dukakis droned on for so long that when he finally said “in conclusion” the entire convention audience gave him a mock cheer. The mob was talking amongst itself and chanting, “We want Mike. We want Mike.” After the speech NBC's John Chancellor mentioned that Clinton might be a possible candidate for 1992 and that this speech certainly didn’t help him. The excessive length of his speech was the talk of the media the next day, but Chancellor was probably wrong. In the end the incident probably helped Clinton more than it hurt him. Any publicity is good publicity. The indiscretion put his name in the public more than a short and effective speech would have.
Clinton defended himself saying that he went over the entire speech with the leadership of the DNC, and they wanted him to cover every subject that he covered. That didn't mean they told him to talk for two hours.
ELECTION OF 1992
The most qualified man ever to run for the Presidency, a man who had won a war with the most impressive display of diplomatic leadership in all of American history, lost in 92 to a man whose qualifications were about a three on a 1-10 as candidates go. A three beats a ten because the economy hit a recession and the three was young and really good-looking, especially compared to the ten. The ten was no “10”. The age difference between Clinton and Bush in 1992 was the largest between the two major candidates in 136 years. Bush was the grandfather and Clinton the Young Turk. Clinton won on youth and his looks more than his record or the policies of his party. If Clinton had been 5'6” 286 lbs and wore thick glasses over a giant nose with a stammering speech pattern he would have lost by six industrial states. In this he was just like his idol John Kennedy who also could never have won if he'd looked like Everett Dirkson.
On June 15 1992 VP Dan Quayle misspelled the word 'potato' in a Trenton schoolroom and the media ran with that for weeks.
Tt was the third place candidate, a man who received no electoral votes who dominated so much of the election campaign of 1992. He was the little billionaire man-of-the-people Ross Perot.
Perot has a voice even more annoying than Fran The Nanny, Drescher! And that's before we get to his awful accent (Southern accents are charming on some people, not him.) But that's not important. What is, is that he was a big phony egomaniac who really thought he was the real deal national savior. For all my dislike of Bill Clinton I would still feel honored and privileged to meet him. I have no desire to meet Ross Perot. Famous talk show host Don Imus of New York said of him, “Ross Perot is the single phoniest person on this planet.”
Perot was an ultra-establishment hippie-hater from the 60's and 70''s who now wanted to make nice for the ex-hippie vote. For a while there, America bought the press kit.
Here was a guy who was the head of General Motors and was worth several billion dollars now claiming that he was the best friend of the little guy. And millions of Americans bought it! It was a nightmare to watch him grow in popularity.
The Perot train was gaining breathless speed and it seemed he might actually win this thing when out of nowhere he decided to drop out of the race! Ross Perot supporters were stunned.
The reason? Perot said that the Republican Party had a dirty tricks squad that was threatening his family, and to protect them he needed to drop out of the race.
Huh?
WWWhhhaaat?
Ross charged the Republic party was hatching a scheme to ruin his daughter’s wedding. He wanted to attend it but he knew the Republican opposition was planning on disseminating doctored pictures of his daughter on the eve of the occasion. The photos would make it seem that his daughter was a very kinky porn star. Perot never produced any proof of these fantastic charges and of course the Republican Party denied it absolutely. No one ever produced the fake pictures of his daughter and the circus clowns.
Unbelievable. I'll never forget. He was on 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl seriously claiming that the Republican's were going to photoshop his daughter into a tramp, and that's why he wasn't going to run for president. The whole thing was so weird. Like he couldn't prove they were fakes and then turn the incident around and play victim to both his and her advantage. That's just for starters.
It was a such a lucky break because I don't know if I could have survived a Perot Presidency. I might have had to move to Togo, (where I actually have a great uncle.) Perot had a real shot and was close on the heels of the two national party candidates and I was at home staring at the floor in depressed disbelief. Out of nowhere he drops out and I'm dancing and smiling and snapping my fingers all around the house singing tunes from Oklahoma!
That was that. People were still talking about him about it a lot, but it was over. A star was stillborn.
Then, about a month later Perot suddenly decided to get back in! But now he had lost the ‘mo,’and couldn’t get it back. His ego was so big he thought he could. Sure, he still had a lot of supporters but now it just wasn’t cool to be a Ross Perot fan. The magic carpet ride wasn’t there any more. There was so much resentment against him from his fan base for quitting that a significant percentage of these people felt he could no longer be trusted. Many of the biggest Perot haters were now the very people who had loved him the most. He had made them look foolish once, holding Perot banners and waving their Perot flags when the music stopped, and now when he tried to strike up the band again he looked behind him and saw less of a crowd. If he'd quit over photoshop crop fakes of his daughter, how could they feel sure that he wouldn’t drop out of the race for some other whimsical reason?
It was unique in presidential history than a hot candidate suddenly calls it a day, but he did, and fate looked after us all. There really is a God!
Perot only real appeal was that he was kissing up to the crowd that always says, “I hate both candidates.” The real secret of Ross Perot’s success was that he was kissing up to their egos, whereas the other two were using the more traditional approach of asking the voters to kiss up to theirs. The lame jive 'people's movement' is one of the tried and true political tricks of the trade. All of a sudden it isn't about raw personal power at the top, now its about “us” and “we” being part of something special and all that type of hype. People bought it by the millions because he had the billions.
In 1969 CBS interviewed the powerful Perot and asked him if he might ever consider running for public office someday. Perot responded, “I honestly believe that I would make one of the worst elected officials in the history of this country.”
I couldn’t agree more. Well said.
He worked hard to try to hide his true redneck inner dog. But sometimes it slipped through the plastic cracks. Perot’s solution to the drug problem?
“You can simply deal with this in straight military terms. You simply declare civil war and the drug dealer is the enemy. At this point, there ain’t no bail. You go straight to POW camp.”
Heill Ross.
Then he contradicts that martinet approach with some sort of 60’s San Francisco flower power value system that supposedly is burning inside him. He closed one key campaign speech with,
“Love in your heart isn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love until you give it away.”
Unless of course you sold his cousin a bag of reefer in which case you’re civil rights are crushed and you go to a prisoner of war camp without a trial. But at least you’ll have Perot’s ‘love’ to carry you through the 60-year sentence.
Back to Bill. Clinton won the election with the help of a lot of ‘I’m a regular guy’TV appearances on entertainment shows, as opposed to political shows. He was more likely to appear on MTV than on Meet the Press. On the Tonight Show and on the dependably unfunny Arsenio Hall Show he played the saxophone with the band.
George Bush and Ross Perot couldn’t match that. The hip media hound Clinton worked hard on his constituency, the young (inherently left) voting bloc. He already had them in his pocket, but it was a long walk from his pocket to the polls. By appearing on their favorite TV shows, maybe he could get the (inherently lazy) young and hip to actually go out and vote. It worked. Ten million more Americans voted in 92 than in 96. A majority of those ten voted for Bill Clinton.
Of course, Clinton was the most personable of the big three, the best orator, the most pleasant and likeable. His good looks won him a lot of female votes, and was instrumental in helping him carry San Francisco.
Clinton also won the debates. “I think that the real mistake that George Bush made was making the ‘read my lips’ promise in the first place just to get elected.” Touché.
Clinton promised a lot of new spending for things like helping family farmers, education, transportation and health care, and he was going to pay for it all with cuts in the defense budget. He promised a 90 billion dollar “peace dividend” at the end of his “first five years.”
During the first week in October a little problem surfaced like a murdered body in a lake. The infamous Clinton letter to Colonel Holmes on avoiding the draft came to light. George H.W. Bush was prepared to use it as maximum ammo in a speech to the Salt Lake City National Guard. But a close advisor suggested that it was not really a powerful piece of dirt and dissuaded President Bush from using it. The Clinton camp later admitted that they were “close to panic” when they thought Bush was going to include it in his speech. Bush later pointed specifically to the non-use of the ROTC letter as a key mistake. “I got some good advice, and I got some bad advice. I took the bad advice,” Bush said when reflecting later on the lost campaign.
Clinton’s choice of Tennessee Senator Al Gore for Vice President was a break with political precedent. Rather than try to balance the ticket with someone less to the left or from another geographical region, he chose a man of the same political leanings and from the same southern region. Bill also chose another young good-looking man. In 1960 handsome liberal Kennedy chose old wrinkly conservative LB Johnson in 1960. Wrinkle Johnson in 64 chose a younger and definitely more liberal VP in Humphrey. Duke chose old man Bentsen in 1988 to balance age, region and liberalism. This pattern has been around for some time with good logical reason. But Clinton went against the grain. As one pundit put it, ‘he doubled himself.’ The Democrats believed that the power of two dynamic young progressives was a better positive net than the balance the ticket approach, and they were probably boldly wise on this one. They also were thinking long-term. They wanted a VP who would still seem young enough in 2000, and that was also probably wise, and if not for the loss of coattails from Bill's loose zipper, the new Prez in 2001 would have been the man who married Tipper.
Clinton painted himself throughout the campaign as a man who grew up in poverty. On July 13, 1992 in New York he told a crowd of working class people, “Many of my family’s relatives were poor for much of my life.” What a semantic stretch that one is. Many of my relatives were rich for a few moments in their lives, like after they hit the number.
On August 13th Clinton gave a speech in California in which he ridiculed the Bush Administration for thinking it had anything to do with winning the Cold War against Communism. He said that “The notion that the Republicans won the Cold War reminds me of the rooster who took credit for the dawn.” - Wrong. Reagan and Bush Sr. had plenty to do with winning the cold war.
Strobe Talbott, in a later book describes Bush unfairly as “personally” taking credit for winning the cold war. GHW Bush was famous for never saying I/Me egoist things. So he certainly didn't exactly say that. Strobe paraphrases sleazily the serious charge, and validates it by grafting on it an exact quote that doesn't actually touch, let alone confirm, the serious accusation,
Bush peppered his stump speeches with an appeal that
voters remember that he had personally “won the cold
war.” (from The Russia Hand by Strobe Talbott 2002)
Clinton went on to explain that Harry Truman had started the west on the road to victory in the Cold War. Truman, you see, was a Democrat, not a Republican.
But Bill, that was ancient history. The Democrats of 1947 bear no relation to the Democrats of Jimmy Carter in 1979 or Bill Clinton in 1992. That's like someone accusing the Republicans of not helping black people today, and having the Republican respond by reminding them that it was Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Republicans deserve credit for winning the cold war. They tried to take more credit than they deserved. But it's the Communists who are being short-changed on credit, not the Dems. The Russians to a large extent, self-imploded. Most of the momentum inside the USSR for embracing democracy didn't come from being threatened by the Republicans in the USA.
But overall, the Republicans did far more to win it than the Democrats. That's not even a close call.
Truman, Kennedy and Johnson pitched in with the chores, I agree. But Clinton is trying to slip the record of Tip O'Neil and George Mitchell and other such recent Democrats (the era when the cold war was won) into the same test score of Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. No way. From 1969 to 1989, the Democrat contribution to the cold war effort was more negative than positive. They were the liberals condemning the United States, advocating and getting huge reductions in military spending and preparedness, and saying that the United States was just as bad as the USSR were, and many said that was worse. The Democrats were the Blame America First party, and that attitude put Reagan in the White House in reaction. Now they want to share the credit for winning the cold war.
The Little Red Hen Dems weren't very helpful when it was being baked, but they cheered along with everyone else when the Bread came out of the oven in 1989-1990.
SLICK WILLIE
In the middle of the 1992 race, a book came out called Slick Willie, Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, by Floyd G. Brown. Here is an on line review from December 1998
“Floyd Brown hits the nail right on the head. ..the first one who actually did some extensive research into who Bill Clinton really is, and the results are stunning. Mr. Brown reveals to a nation caught up in impeachment that we knew all along, ever since he entered the 1992 election, that Slick Willie is dangerous for America. Floyd has fully documented, emotionally written accounts of Draft dodging, drug dealing, Gennifer Flowers, and more. And this is where all the scandal began. Brown tells of his life-threatening experiences he went through to research and publish the book, and goes through in-depth analysis on how Clinton is a criminal, a liar, and how he had been that way long before 1992. Floyd Brown's Slick Willie:Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton - is crucial to properly understanding what the Clinton White House is all about.”
Sid Blumenthal in his impressive memoir The Clinton Wars successfully sliced and diced the Brown book to bits. Sid destroyed Floyd. Slick Willie, the book, was 10 times more slick and dishonest than Slick Willie, the man, could ever dream of being. Web sites and partisan pundits can fight back as long as they are alone doing it, but if Sid went up one on one in a fair fight with anyone associated with this book they would drag the Slick Willie defenders out on a platter.
The upshot of this book was that the nickname 'Slick Willie' became a popular expression in America. Brown did more long term damage to Bill by making the nickname stick, even though few of the actual charges could.
I hope the reader is confused as to my real feelings about Bill Clinton, since I always am, and that's the message I'm trying to deliver. I am not a knee-jerk Clinton hater and am (more obviously) not a knee-jerk Clinton defender. But there are too many of both.
That pretty much sums up the 8 years of politics in America from 1993 to 1999. The nation was divided between 100 million people who thought Clinton could do no right, 100 million people who thought he could do no wrong, and 100 million people who watch Seinfeld re-runs until they fall asleep at 4 a.m. and could care less who wins any election.
SOFT ON CRIME
Senior Bush lost partly because he was soft on crime. Not on crime itself but on the crime issue. After the election many Clinton strategists remarked how relieved they were that Bush never went after Clinton on the crime issue. They felt that this was a major comparative weakness for Clinton and they braced themselves for the Bush attacks which never came.
The reason for this shortage of Bush artillery is fairly obvious. Bush felt bad about exploiting this issue in 1988 when he and his party ran all those Willie Horton ads hitting Mike Dukakis for letting that man out of jail so he could go rape and murder someone. For four years the left ripped Bush for the “Willie Horton strategy.” Now Bush just didn't want to do it again and “Lowlife Lee” Atwater wasn't around to convince him that he had to.
Bush also failed to exploit properly, his tremendous leadership performance in the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991. And remember, in 1992 no one was moaning yet that “he didn't finish the job.” That revisionist hindsight evolved only much later. The Bush-bashers often mock how his mother Barbara had instilled in GHW to never brag, and never to take credit for anything in public. Even Bush haters admit that this was a true story about how he was raised. That this was the main reason he refused to allow the Desert Storm performance to be a foundation of his publicity campaign in 1992. Desert Storm was hardly mentioned at all. The Bush TV ads didn't even mention it, let alone spotlight it. It was astonishingly illogical, and, to my mind, Barbara's motherism decidedly contributed to her son's defeat for re-election.
Bush carried only four important states, Florida, Texas, Virginia and Indiana, and the last one is borderline. Clinton took the entire northeast and the west coast, as the Democrats usually do. It wasn't close.
THE WINNER'S CIRCLE
Bill, Hillary, Al and Tipper were beaming while I was bumming. It was a hard night. Now I knew. Now I know what they go through, those many liberal friends of mine, who hurt on election night when Republicans win these things. Watching the four of them smiling dancing to “Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as if that song made them revolutionary and hip was a low water mark in my house. I can't stand that stupid song and Fleetwood Mac is the most overrated band of all time. I can’t get those awful scenes out of my head: Bill, Hillary, Tipper and Al semi-dancing in front of a cheering crowd to that awful song, the triumphant newly elected. If a black comedian wanted to make fun of how uncool white people can look, he could run a clip of the four of them half – dancing on Election night 92.
That night I saw on ABC a nauseating clip of the always undiplomatic FOB (friend of Bill) James Carville choking up and crying on the eve of the election because he knew they were going to win. Where’s the spittoon? Then there was Stephanopoulos saying this is great because starting tomorrow, people are going to get better health care, as though it wasn’t about power. Where’s the vodka?
It was my fourth presidential election vote and my first loser. I had chosen not to vote in 1976 at 21 years of age. I had been indifferent about Ford and Carter. I didn't vote in 1980 and I regretted it because I liked Reagan by a slight margin, so I at least should have made a call. In any case my team won in 80 and won the next two in 84 and 88. Now in 92 I finally knew how the Reagan haters felt when he and his veep were elected in 84 and 88. Now I had to watch the other team skate the Stanley Cup around the rink.
The January 1993 Inauguration festival, especially the night-time one, was a tough one. Where's the whiskey?
The 96 Inaugural didn’t hurt so much because Dole was so hopeless from the start. He had had lost on the day the Reps nominated him, so there was no hope on election night anyway, and besides, the Dems were already in power anyway. Nothing changed when Dole lost.
The party moving in does a lot more smiling than the one re-elected. Watching Dems crying with joy was brutal. Worst of all was Bill Clinton in a church that night listening to gospel music with a big smile and real tears pouring down the side of his cheek for the cameras. He was that moved by the spiritual beauty of the music, you see. You cornball hamster! Get a grip. Clinton often showed off tears for the cameras for the next 8 years. It was nauseating.
The Clinton Inaugural was filled with Hollywood movie stars as well as several legitimate political thinkers. The entertainment world is about 98% leftists so the Clinton win was a great day for show biz. Popular singing artist Luther Vandross put it this way,
“The inauguration has mobilized the whole entertainment community. We feel like we can be heard again after all these years.”
For the Clintons, the inaugural theme wasn’t a Marine band playing Hail to the Chief, it was rock and roll loudspeakers blaring our songs now, not theirs. The hippies had arrived.
Clintons noon time speech was the usual drivel about how now that he was in power,
“It is time for us to forget about who is in, and who is out, who is up and who is down.”
Convenient catholicism all of a sudden. Rock singer Carly Simon was there. Maya Angelou brought the party to a standstill with a long read of her poetry, everyone in the crowd trying for an interested face through the cold wind. Nine out of every ten people like to write poetry. One out of evert 50 genuinely like to hear it.
Oh well. But at least the liberal crowd would have to be the defenders instead of the attackers for a while. It’s easier to shoot an arrow than it is to catch it.
Clinton brought some old friends into his Washington team, and added a few that had been active in the Carter Administration (just as Obama put quite a few people from the Clinton team onto his.)
Warren Christopher became Secretary of State, Les Aspen Secretary of Defense, Tony Lake his top national Security Advisor, and Sandy Berger Lake's assistant.
Clinton named Madeline Albright Ambassador to the United Nations. It was the second time a woman had manned that post (can you name the first? Hint: She was a great person and all her political opinions were right on the money.)
The new DCI, Director of Central Intelligence was James Woosley.
Sandy Berger had been offered the job of top National Security Advisor, with Lake at #2. But Sandy insisted that Lake was more qualified, and that he, Berger, should be number two, not one. Clinton accepted Berger's offer and flipped the roles. It was a rare selfless gesture in the world of competitive politics.
Then there were the Little Rock FOB's who would be on our televisions for the next 19 years, and counting, debating politics as pundits. I can turn on political TV shows right and find an old FOB within a half an hour.
This gang includes partisan attack dogs like James Carville, and Paul Begala, two men that never one time in their entire lives tried to be fair and objective. I don't know why anyone ever interviews them, since their answers to everything can be written out before they get out of the network limo. Dems are good, Reps are bad, and we'll tell you why without a stumble no matter what you say or ask. They were two top FOB's (foot-lickers of Bill.)
George Stephanopoulos started out as a FOB but near the end of the Clinton term was one of the few who openly expressed some disappointment with his King for the personal scandals and all the harm they did to the nation. And I did say some.
Now Stephanopoulos is a big ABC TV news star, ostensibly a political neutral, but of course a liberal soldier. He gets a new show every two years. Now he even anchors the ABC nightly news when Katie Couric goes to the Bahamas. And they say there isn't a liberal media bias! If Pat Buchanan anchored the CBS news no one would tolerate that polemic placement, but as long as it's a Democrat, it's ok.
The Clintons wanted a new FBI director, but that isn't the way it works. The director is appointed for a ten year term partly to insure that at least two different Administrations would have to deal with the same man and the job therefore could not be used as a political weapon. The Clinton's did not like William Sessions, and they did plenty to see that he had to sept down by the end of his first year, replaced by William Freeh, who ended up disliking the Clintons far more than they had disliked Sessions.
HONEYMOON MONTHS
Clinton started his record off on an awkward note. On his second day in office his choice for Attorney General, Zoie Baird was deemed a hopeless cause and he had to withdraw her name from consideration. It seems that Baird had hired illegal aliens to clean her toilets many years ago. Clinton had hinted during the election that he was likely to name a woman for the court. He picked the wrong woman. Not the last time that was going to happen.
One week later Clinton broke a solemn campaign promise that he would issue an executive order permitting gays to openly enlist and serve in the military. He postponed the decision for six months in order to calm the angry chiefs of the armed services who were adamantly opposed to straight men sharing the same shower with avowed homosexual men. The Navy was the most adamant, which is understandable considering the stresses of a 6 month tour of duty on a submarine.
Many in the military actually respected Clinton less for backing down to them. They would have seen him in a higher light if he had defied them. He was the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and if their insubordination, regardless of the arguments it was based on, could be accepted on this, then what was the point of his title as C in C?
In fact, the military people from top down respected Clinton less than any president in my lifetime. Many prominent military leaders considered him a draft-dodger and to them it was an awkward concept for this hippie-with-a-hair-cut to send US troops into harms way. The entire Clinton organization was anti-military. The pictures of Clinton with a beard leading antiwar protests at Oxford were relevant. And we did say 'leading.'
A decorated military man said good morning to a new Clinton staffer at the beginning of his term and she snapped back, “I don’t talk to military.” It was an incident. The yippies are coming! That story swept through the military like a firestorm and the lines were drawn between the draft-dodger and the all-volunteer armed forces.
Then his second Attorney General choice also backfired. He nominated for Kimba Wood who lasted about a day and a half after it was revealed that she had once hired an illegal alien baby sitter. His third choice for a female Attorney General was Janet Reno a Dade County Florida prosecutor. She assured the press that she had never hired illegal aliens and was “an old maid.” The battle over the AG was settled but the new president's first weeks were so bogged down by this hassle that he found it difficult to dictate any positive message or proposals.
WTC ONE FEB 26 1993
The Clinton era started off with a bang. On February 26 1993 Arab radical terrorists set off a huge bomb in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. The idea was to topple one of the Trade Center towers and send it into the other tower and bring them both down.
6 extremely innocent people died in the bombing and more than a thousand were injured.
The right has accused Clinton of failing to respond properly to this attack. The right says that the second WTC attack of 9.11.01 might have been avoided if only Clinton and his team had reacted like a reactionary and got really tough with the Arab threat.
At face value I have to agree with this criticism, but I also have to remember how I felt about it at the time as an individual and go from there when passing judgement on American leadership.
Most people just didn't take the idea seriously that the bomb of 2-26 had the potential to bring the towers down. I certainly didn't. I thought of it as a bad thing that happened in the news, but I didn't take it 100 time more seriously than, say, a terror bomb that killed a judge in his office in Washington. I wanted to go on with my life and put WTC One behind me as another unfortunate violent incident that didn't touch me personally.
Nearly two decades later there are a thousand experts and two dozen books condemning Clinton's lack of aggressive tough response to the attack of 1993. But if my own behavior is any sample of the national mood, Clinton was probably in tune with the country he was in charge of when he didn't overreact, as we now know he should have because of what happened 8 years after WTC One. He too, probably could never have imagined that 1- the WTC might have easily gone down as planned on 2-26, and 2 – nine years later they actually would come down. If Clinton had a crystal ball he would have become a reactionary in the wake of 2-26. But then again, if GHW Bush had the same crystal ball, he would have “finished the job” in Iraq in 1991. If I had the same crystal ball I would moved to LA when I was about 24 instead of plying my comedy trade in Boston for 35 years. We can't judge the past from the future, only by how we felt at the time, and I don't recall yelling on talk radio about how Clinton isn't doing enough in response to the Feb 26 attack.
I'll return to this story when the perps are put in trial, but I think the real story is how the USA tried to put WTC 1 in it's rear view mirror as soon as possible. There were no crowds chanting outside the White House chanting for revenge and asking why Clinton has no guts.
WHAT WILL BE HIS LEGACY? HMMM...
In early February 1993 the Clinton team retreated to the Camp David retreat to have an endless series of meetings to discuss strategy and to listen to ‘Windbag Willie’ talk on and on and on.
He was brutal. Everyone has friends and relatives who can't stop talking. If you love them, you can tell then to shut up. When it's the King, who can stop him? His aides often tried to gently hint that it was time to move on or make a decision on something but Clinton could not stop himself from talking.
One important CD meeting was titled officially, “A free-flowing discussion of how the Government, the Nation, and the World will be different as a result of the Clinton-Gore administration.”
I can answer that from the perspective on one who lived through it. The only significant difference will be that at the end of the Clinton-Gore administration children will be openly discussing oral sex and semen stains without blushing. Triple-X will for the first time in history be front page news in newspapers, in magazines, and on TV and radio. Prior to Clinton, sex was something adults tried to hide from children, and could usually do so to a point. It was something naughty and mysterious. Clinton made everyone talk about his oral sex life for a year. That is your legacy. That is how things are different.
Other than that the nation was not very much different. Clinton broke most of his campaign promises. He promised not to raise taxes on the middle class and he did. He promised to reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and he didn’t. He chastised president Bush for not getting tough with China after the violence of Tianamen Square and he continued the exact same foreign policy towards China while in office. He promised to reduce the deficit and he did.
I didn’t say he broke all of his promises.
HAPPY ST. PATRICKS DAY, MOTOR VOTER
On March 17, 1993 the Senate approved the National Voter Registration Act, making it easier for the average person to register to vote. The idea until now was that those who felt an inner drive to so the right thing would register and vote. With the NVRA most routine government-citizens transactions now included the chance to register. It was in one's face when renewing a driver's license (hence the nickname Motor-Voter) or signing up for food stamps. The default position was now to be a registered voter, where before it was unregistered. 28 million new voters came on the rolls in the first year of the Clinton Presidency. The left probably gained more political power from this act than the right.
Clinton defenders cite the NVRA as one of his many solid positive achievements.
STIMULUS PACKAGE
Early in the first administration Clinton announced a lot of cuts in government spending and some new taxes, including an energy tax that would sting the middle class. Clinton was of course breaking a campaign pledge not to tax the middle class. Top aide Stephanopoulos later said that Clinton’s pledge was far short of Bush’s “read my lips” promise, but that is hair-splitting. A broken campaign promise is a broken campaign promise.
When his tax plan, combined with reductions in government spending, irritated some as constituting a broken promise to the middle class, Clinton offered this at a photo session,
“I’ve made more specific cuts that affect me personally than I think that any of my predecessors have.”
He’s even suffering personally as a result of these tax hikes and spending cuts? Well! I guess it’s fried-baloney sandwiches at the Clinton household for the foreseeable future. Looks like Chelsea will be getting a lump of coal for Christmas this December… That’s an arrogant rich-man thing to say. As if he can’t make 25 grand any time he needs it by giving a 45 minute speech about any of a thousand topics to any of ten thousand groups.
Clinton’s tax hikes, combined with reductions in government spending programs, were combined with a so-called “stimulus package.” Obama gave the nation more than one. Clinton was big on them. This was a new spending program for all his pet dog programs and was to be implemented at the same time he was boasting about government spending cuts in other areas. The net result would still be a reduction in overall government spending and a reduction in the deficit, but it was a delicate sell to the man in the street and was a plan vulnerable to a Republican filibuster. Clinton’s Republican opposition, in alliance with a small handful of conservative Democrats defeated the stimulus package. It had been an important dream for President Clinton and a part of his campaign for office and to lose it early on in his first term was a bitter blow.
Billy C. may have tried to reduce the deficit too much too soon. His monetary advisors told him that the big business people were resentful, and felt that Clinton was engaging in class warfare by concentrating most of the new tax increases on the rich.
MISSILE STRIKE ON IRAQ JUNE 1993
In April of 1993 former President Bush visited Kuwait, the nation he had liberated from Iraqi totalitarian occupation in February of 1991. The Kuwaiti people welcomed GHWB with joy. But but not everyone in the crowd of well wishers wished this wise westerner well. Some wanted Bush dead. An Iraqi plot to assassinate the former Prez while he was visiting in Kuwait was in place and ready to go when combined allied intelligence discovered and thwarted it in the nick of time.
President Clinton decided to act in retaliation. On June 23, 1993 as a direct response to the Iraqi assassination plot, Bill Clinton ordered US warships in the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf to launch 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles into select targets in Iraq. Most hit their intended targets, such as buildings that housed the Iraqi secret police, and Sadaam's private golf course. But four missed the mark and killed innocent civilians.
This was a statement and a half coming from a Democrat, a stark break with the Jimmy Carter pacifist past. It got everyone’s attention mostly for it’s indirect message. Clinton was probably sincere in his desire to avenge the assassination attempt and may have even had a direct selfish motive to protect himself whenever he traveled. But the larger motive was the signal to the two Parties, the American people and the world that this Democrat President was willing to use military force and would not let the US become a paper tiger again like it had become in the wake of the US Vietnam exit and the mass pacifism in its wake. Maybe the Oxford beard really was shaved. Maybe Carter naiveté was a thing of the past and Clinton really was part conservative. The same centrism that won him the presidency was revealing itself in his foreign policy posture as well. It was part of why he won the presidency twice after two liberals, Mondo and Duke had lost it twice.
Clinton showed with 23 Tomahawks that he wasn’t merely posturing when he claimed some centrist proclivities. He was also signaling a respect for continuity, not radical change, connecting with the leftover work of the previous administrations. The missile strike of 2-93 was linkage between the parties in foreign policy and deliberately so, an olive branch of war extended towards his predecessors. Clinton was demonstrating that he too could get eight hours of sleep with blood on his hands. Clinton wanted to be a little more like Ronald Reagan than he would care to admit to Republicans, and a little less like Jimmy Carter than he’d care to admit to Democrats. The deed said what he dared not say in words.
Clinton and elder Bush have developed a sort of friendship in the 2000’s that has startled the world. It’s like Adams and Jefferson. I wonder if some of it has to do with Clinton whacking Iraq when he heard that they tried to kill Bush. That might inspire some kind good feelings between the two. I know that if a drunken heckler ruined one of my shows and then some friend of mine destroyed the guy's house with a very large bomb I'd be truly grateful for all of my days.
SO LONG 'TRIPLE M'
Clinton's 1993 budget came down to one vote in the House of Representatives. The budget included the Deficit Reduction Act which was the controversial item. A freshman Congresswoman named Margorie Margoleis Mezvinski, Democrat from Pennsylvania walked to the Capitol Building to cast the deciding vote. It was a rare moment for one person, and a no-name no less, to hold the deciding vote on a trillion dollars and how it would be spent.
Although a Democrat, the lady known as “Triple M” was against the Budget until Clinton called her to the Oval Office for some friendly charm and persuasion. When she walked out she had changed her mind, and was adjusting her smeared make-up. Now it was no secret that she was going to walk to the Hill and pass the Budget. The Republicans had voted unanimously against the Budget and were bitter that Clinton had charmed and pressured her into changing her vote. As she walked up to cast the deciding vote many of the Republican bullies began to sing, “Good-bye Margie, Good-bye Margie, Good bye margie, we hate to see you go.”
The meaning behind this taunt was that the voters in her district were not in favor of Clinton's new Budget and its taxes, and they would throw her out of office for this vote. They were right. Triple M lost her bid for re-election in 1994.
Margorie MM was a reporter for NBC's Today Show before she ran for Congress in 1992. She married a Congressman in the 1970's.
CHICKENHAWK DOWN/ SOMALIA OCTOBER 1993
The movie gave it more prominence in the minds of the general public than the event did when it happened. Black Hawk Down was a major motion picture, and far more people go to the movies than read the newspapers about current events.
So now the general public has a rather right-wing take on the events in Somalia in the fall of 1993. Here is the general consensus in the light of the book and the movie, and the TV documentary based on both the book and the film.
Bill Clinton wanted to be a hawk but he was a chicken at heart. Clinton committed US forces to a place in eastern Africa, and when our chopper crews were shot down and trapped, and we took casualties in the struggle to get them out, he pulled out. President Clinton wasted the noble sacrifices of our fighting men. He withdrew as soon as the going got hot, and he shamed the flag in the process. This man was no military commander in chief, and Mogadishu proved it.
This is a presentist revisionist assessment based on a pop phee-nom movie and the cultural ripple from that film. I'm not saying that I disagree with that consensus, but I don't like the way it was arrived at, through pop propaganda long after the fact.
First some background.
There was trouble in Somalia in the latter months of the Bush Senior Administration.
Somalia in the GHWB years was a land of starvation and civil war. There did not seem to be any simple solution available without getting the United States into a political quagmire, so the best the US could all do was support humanitarian relief through the United Nations and through American volunteer efforts both private and public.
The United States began airlifting food supplies to the starving Somali people, but the local warlords stole the food as soon as it hit the sand. So the U.S. was not only failing in its relief effort, it was actually feeding the bad guy soldiers who were in turn continuing to starve and kill more innocent Somalis.
The number one bad guy in the Somalia Civil War was a warlord by the name of Mohammed Farah Aideed. Mo was the enemy of freedom and democracy in the region. The UN and the USA were in agreement on this point.
In November of 1992 the UN asked the US to lead a multi-national effort to feed the starving Somalians, and while we were at it, to “disarm the warlords.”
This kind of euphemistic language can be dangerous. It really means go to war with an entrenched military force at a distant hostile and geographically daunting location with no guarantee of victory, and no attractive exit strategy even if prevailing militarily. The word “disarm” gives the military mission a peacenik aura that war is not entitled to. As if the US Marines could march into Aideed's camp, and ask him and his boys to place their weapons in a great big pile while everyone sang John Lennon songs, and melted them down in a Texas A&M bonfire.
Secretary of State Eagleburger (one of my favorites) at the end of 1992 just said no to the UN request that American military power solve the crisis. Larry did agree to humanitarian aid.
In December 1992 the USA deployed Operation Restore Hope to Somalia. The operation was still under way when Clinton took office. This time the United States seemed to be getting relief supplies to the starving Somalis without it being stolen by Aideed's henchmen. At the same time the US was pressuring the UN to gradually take over the operation.
But things got hot in the Clinton summer of 1993 and the result was a mission to capture Aideed and hopefully bring peace to Somalia.
The Allied order of battle on October 3, 1993 was of an MH-60 chopper group mission to kidnap or kill Aideed at a downtown Mogadishu hotel. The USA had reliable info that he would be there at a certain time on a certain day.
The Black Hawks hovered over the hotel in the early stages of the mission. The Somalis may have had only primitive rifles and grenade launchers left over from the Vietnam War era, but against a hovering helicopter, the weapons were good enough. Two choppers were taken down and there were KIA's.
The mission to kill Aideed instantly switched over to a mission to rescue the downed crews of those choppers.
The rescue missions became a major running battle. It was 160 Americans against 3,000 Somalis.
The ordeal of the downed and wounded American chopper crew
lasted two days and is the story of the blockbuster action packed movie. The shooting never stops in the movie. I think they expended more ammo in the film than they did in Somalia.
The number of Somalis killed in the firefights is a subject of some dispute. Western press estimates ran as high as a thousand killed. Usually the figure is somewhere in the 700 club. Today the Somali leaders deny such high casualties and counter with an estimate of about 100.
In any case the rescue was an heroic success and the basis of the legacy of the affair. The political-historical consensus is now based on the phenomenon of the film, book, and History Channel documentary. How people felt about it at the time is suddenly of little relevance.
It is important to note that at the time it happened, there was no hue and cry to go back to Somalia in any of the newspapers, nor on any of the conservative radio talk shows. I never heard a gripe about it in any diners I ever went to, and I like going to diners. I like to listen for the man on the street take on things, not because anyone at a diner ever says anything insightful, but to listen to what is on people's mind politically and to see which events are passing the 'diner test.'
It's unfair to point a collective angry index finger at Clinton and say shame on you for withdrawing from Somalia, when the national consensus at the time was “What the hell are we doing over there in the first place?” The consensus at the time was not, “Let's go back and finish the mission and restore the insult to old glory at Mogadishu.” But now the majority of Americans feel that way, from center-left to all points right, and it isn't right. If only Black Hawk Down had been produced and released while it was all going on.
A new revisionist twist has been added in 2009 with the rise of piracy in East African waters. The kidnaping of an American merchant marine captain in April of 2009 has led to harsh criticism of ex-Prez Clinton. The pirates that are raiding merchant ships in the western Indian Ocean are based in Somalia and the Somali government is doing nothing to stop the practice. Right-wing blowhards are saying that Clinton had the chance to fix the situation in Somalia, but he turned tail and ran when the going got tough. Again, that might well be a valid observation, but it isn't if you didn't feel that way at the time.
It was in March 1994 that Clinton completely withdrew from Somalia.
Madeleine Allbright suggests that Clinton showed great courage in resisting calls to withdraw completely right away after Black hawk down. That's a clever ploy in the other direction. What's the difference, Madame Secretary, between withdrawing in a year or a month? The fact was that he withdrew. You take a passive withdrawal from a US commitment and change it into a macho medal of honor because he resisted calls to withdraw immediately and all at once. That's like saying that Nixon won the Vietnam War because he withdrew our troops gradually, and not all at once like the hippies demanded.
RWANDA - HUTU NAZIS 1993-4
The timing couldn't have been worse for the victims in Rwanda. Just when the United States and the UN were getting burned badly in Somalia and beginning to retreat from humanitarian interventionism in general, a situation arose in the small isolated country of Rwanda that desperately called out for UN and US humanitarian interventionism. When the crisis in Rwanda finally subsided in 1994, at least 750,000 Rwandans were dead. That's two hundred and eighty World Trade Centers.
But these were not simply the victims of the fighting in a civil war. They were the victims of premeditated genocide. A civil war was part of the picture, but most of the dead were unarmed civilians whose only crime was being a member of the minority tribe in that civil war, victims of lowlife Hutus.
The Tutsis were the minority in Rwanda but they had more privileges in society and government. So they were resented by the majority Hutus who had the numbers but not the power. The scum Hutus staged a rebellion to change all that, but taking power was not enough. They sought to systematically murder the entire race of Tutsis.
To give one example, the Hutus broke into a Tutsi hospital and killed all the doctors nurses and orderlies. They went home to rest and then the next day came back and killed all the patients in their hospital beds. It was like the horrors of Nanking in World War II.
THE SCANDALS BEGIN
TROOPERGATE
The scandal monsoon started raining in December 1993. Clinton had a year under his belt before his loose belt started to catch up to him.
The American Spectator and the Los Angeles Times almost simultaneously broke the scandal dubbed “Troopergate”.
The Spectator is and was a right-wing magazine run by a bitter hippie-hater named Tyrrell. If the Spectator alone ran the story it would not have been half as damaging. But the LA Times ran the same story at almost the same time and thereby validated the Spectator.
The story was simple. The President of the United States was a serial infidel. He wasn’t just cheating on his wife, he had turned it into an organized way of life with elaborate rituals. What was more important, he had used government employees to facilitate his affairs.
Two former Arkansas State troopers said they had been employed by Governor Clinton to both enable and hide his sexual liaisons. They would deliver the message to the target bimbos, arrange for a safe place for the Governor to get the candy, and then vouch for his innocent whereabouts. In effect they had become Arkansas State Pimps.
The Troopergate articles indirectly led to Paula Crobin Jones.
One of the troopers was quoted in both articles as saying that a certain woman by the name of Paula had agreed to become “Clintons’ girlfriend whenever he wanted her.” The ‘Paula’ whose good name was impugned by this passage heard about it and hit the roof. Paula Jones had another version of what happened. She said that Clinton had exposed himself to her against her wishes and had grabbed her hand and tried to put it on his genitals. She pulled away all upset and left the hotel room in horror. It was bad enough what he had done to her, but to now see her name in print as a willing participant after an unwanted lewd sexual advance was too much for the lady with the ‘big hair.’ Paula decided to go public to defend her reputation.
The left always ridiculed Paula Jones as ‘white trash.’ That is a racist epithet convenient at the moment for the liberals to adopt with a smile.
THE $200 HAIRCUT
At Los Angeles International Airport on May 18, 1993 passengers on several commercial airliners sat for an hour during an unscheduled delay for take-off. It seemed that Air Force One was sitting idly on the main runway while important presidential business was being attended to. Bill Clinton was getting a haircut.
There were several barbers within walking distance of the White House who charged ten dollars for a haircut, but Clinton wanted something much better, something much more classy.
Clinton was getting his hair cut by one of the famous stylists of Beverly Hills, the one, the only “Christophe.” I suppose if this clown had two names instead of one he would have charged the President only thirty dollars or so, but since he had a gimmick celebrity one-word name he charged Clinton $200 for the haircut. This was back in 1993 when a dollar could still buy a room at the Hyatt Regency. Today's average haircut is up to $15-20. But even by today's standards, $200 for a haircut is an insult to the common people.
Critics let him have it and comedians set up their short-range mortars. One journalist concluded that there were three types of people who would never do this. The Rich (they were frugal in order to get rich,) the poor (they couldn't if they wanted to) and the middle class ( it was just common sense.) So that left only one income bracket that would do that, the nouveau riche who wanted to show off and hadn't earned their newfound wealth anyway.
The worst part of the story is that the planes that idled for an hour needlessly cost the airlines a total of $76,000 in lost revenue. Way to stimulate the economy, Prez
But the criticism didn't stop Bill and Hillary the “Hill-Billys” of D.C. When Family Circle magazine planned a story on Hillary they had Christophe flown to D.C. to cut her hair. The stylists tacked on air fare and hotel for the service and the bill came to $2,000 for the lady's cut.
Blementhal, in his well-written book, says that the charge is not true, and that no planes were in fact delayed while the President got sheared. Sidney in fact, says in his book that every thing ever charged against Bill Clinton was 100% false. I don't even think Clinton would defend himself to that extreme.
FORT MARCY PARK – JULY 1993
It was July 20 1993, a date that will live in infamy in the Clinton Administration; The new FBI Director Lou Freeh had just met with the press on the White House lawn; Clinton had spoken with reporters as he introduced his nominee. In the background was a smiling Vince Foster, lifelong friend of Bill Clinton. Foster had been knocked down a few notches in the Travelgate fiasco.
Foster was depressed about something. He told his assistant Linda Tripp. “You can have the rest of my M&M's.” It was his last recorded words on the planet. 'Big Lin' didn't pass up the offer and was hurling a handful of the colorful treats into her mouth as Foster departed the White House grounds. He walked over to Fort Macy Park, an old Civil War era historical ground just across the river in Virginia. He shot himself in the head. A park policeman found the body. The weapon used was an antique 1913 Colt revolver.
The death of VF was ruled a suicide by a number of unprejudiced investigation teams, including the Ken Starr group. Yet many right-wingers have insisted to this day that the Clintons or their supporters had murdered Vince Foster!
I talk to conservatives all over the country and I am shocked by how many of them really believe this. I don’t. But I don’t want to start an argument about it so I just sort of keep listening and wait for a change in subject. The idea that the Clintons would be involved in murder is something I refuse to even entertain.
One of the top theories is that Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton were having an affair, although that doesn’t make it clear why he had to kill himself over it. Its not like serial infidel Bill had any reason to find a shotgun and go get him.
Foster tore up his suicide note before he shot himself. He says he was innocent of any legal wrongdoing and was not cut out for the job and its awful publicity.
Vince singled out the Wall Street Journal, accusing them of lying all the time. The WSJ had printed several articles in recent weeks in which they threw a hefty punch at Foster for messing things up for the Clintons. Foster couldn't take the heat, and he was probably “wound up tight” to begin with.
“THE BIGGEST MISTAKE OF MY PRESIDENCY”
In the spring of 1994, at the same time he was dealing with the death of his mother, Bill Clinton, going against Hillary's advice, agreed to let a special independent prosecutor investigate the Whitewater Case.
Janet Reno ended up naming a team that took an investigation of a complex matter of 16 year old bank loans so that someone could get an even larger loan from the Small Business Administration, and extrapolated it into an investigation of Clinton's sex life. Whitewater then led sort of by accident to Monicagate.
Whitewater involved a $300,000 loan to Jim and Susan MacDougal of Arkansas. Sue eventually did time, and looked like a martyr in those chains. Clips of Susan MacDougal, a friend of the Clintons, pretty in a prison uniform, were common for a little spell there. It was an unsettling image, a rich upscale FOB in prison garb, unreal like it was someone's amateur film project, and someone was going to yell “cut!” and Susan would take off the fake chains.
One of the bad guys in Arkansas the story is a man called “Justice Jim”, and the other is Nat Hale. According to the Clinton defenders Hale got caught making an illegal loan, so then he changed his story to how the Clintons had set him up and were just out to get him. JJ started calling news agencies who took his version and ran with it like they had some inside scoop on new revelations that Clinton had a corrupt past that stretches all the way from DC back to the Ozarks.
Every time one newspaper or magazine article exaggerated rumors into facts, the most legitimate news organizations like ABC, The New Republic, and the New York Times, not wanting to get left out in the latest sensational story, would print a story about the other story, validating it into a fact. Powerful rich right-wing organizations embraced anyone with a scandal to tell about Clinton and Whitewater or the women he ruined. The top authors, politicians, editors and reporters of the left, right and everything in between, hovered around these Republican sponsored rumor-mills and these became instant headlines as though they were true.
The Whitewater rumor mill ran with the big one, that Hillary had gained wealth through illegal insider trade deals in an Arkansas land-development project. People who hated her believed anything negative they ever heard about her. She and Bill were supposedly even bumping off people.
In the hysteria over the sex scandals, most people forgot about Whitewater. They didn't even notice when, long after smoke had cleared over Monica and company, the final conclusion in the Whitewater investigation was that the Clinton's had been guilty of no illegal activity.
DICK MORRIS ARRIVES
At around the time of the Congressional elections of 1994, Bill Clinton called up Dick Morris and asked him for some advice. Morris gave it to him, but Mr. Clinton disagreed and didn't do what Dick told him to. The Democrats got clobbered in the election and Clinton called Morris and said, “Dick, you were right. I should have listened to you. You must come on board so this doesn't happen again.”
At least that's the way the conceited Dick tells it in his book Behind the Oval Office. Clinton had hired and fired Morris back when Bill ran for Governor of Arkansas. Now he wanted him back.
Hillary was in favor of hiring Morris because Morris was a dirty fighter and Bill was not; that is, not unless some wicked wizard like Morris stood behind him and pushed him.
Morris is one of most powerful persons in the history of the Clinton Administration. Today he is on TV all the time talking trash about politics, in his wimpy yet very strong speaking voice.
Most of Clinton's advisors wanted him to stress his big achievements and to go on the attack against the popular pseudo-populist Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich and his 'Contract With America.'
Morris told Clinton that the public didn't believe that the big achievements were legitimate, and even if they were, the public didn't think Clinton was entitled to any credit for them.
Morris wanted Clinton to stress smaller achievement, but ones that were definitely his. The public would respond better to lesser provable achievements than they would to greater but dubious for credit achievements.
Morris also warned Bill that this new Republican 'Contract With America' was 'the latest craze' and it would be a mistake to go after the Republicans on that.
Morris told Clinton that his ratings were so low right now (“Mr. Irrelevant”) that he would best serve the Democratic party by staying out of all local elections. Don't endorse anyone, the whole country is down on you right now, so stay away or the party will pay.
Clinton didn't listen to his old pal Dick, and it turned out that Dick was right.
Morris has worked for both Democrats and Republicans and thinks he is a genius. I used to think maybe he was, but once I realized that he is drunk with conceit about being a political genius, it makes me think he isn't, but is somewhat ingenius at selling that he is.
Morris is on my television more than Queen Latifa! I thought I knew him, and liked him, but he has been so wrong so often on so many of his daring calls that I doubt him now. Anyone can make te daring calls and see two of the come true and make a point of advertising those two swami calls while conveniently forgetting the eight klunkers.
Famed Carolina reactionary Jesse Helms once fired Dick Morris, and Bill Clinton fired Dick Morris. Later on he claims to really hate Jesse Helms on moral grounds, but I think he didn't hate Helms until Helms fired him. Then he got back at redneck Jesse at the typewriter. Morris is a political realist who enjoys the process of the fight far more than the principles on the table. Even if he denied that, Bill Clinton saw him that way and Morris does not actually deny that.
ELECTIONS OF 1994
The Republicans did very well in the 1994 election, so much so that it was called “The Republican Revolution.” Newt Gingrich, “the Georgian Giant,” drafted something called the “Contract with America.” I could never bring myself to read the lame vague rhetorical document. It really was an opposition rack to hang that coats of discontent on.
The Republicans gained control of the Senate by a margin of 52-48, gaining 8 seats, and unseating six incumbent Donkeys.
In the House, the Republicans gained a stunning 56 seats, taking control of that body for the first time since Ike was the President. The Democrats had the run of the House for 40 years.
Speaker of the House Tom Foley lost his local election in Washington State, the first time a sitting Speaker has been voted out since the time of Abraham Lincoln!
In Texas, the Republican son of a President won the Texas governorship from incumbent Ann Richards, the woman who lambasted GHW at the 1988 Dem Convention in Atlanta. Richards took it like a man.
Jeb Bush became Florida Governor, to round out the dynasty that makes Mark Phillips so mad.
MR IRRELEVANT
People around this time were not only talking about Clinton not winning in 1996, they were presuming it. It was common knowledge. Lefty comedians I gave rides home to were bemoaning how Clinton doesn't have a chance to win in 1996 because of the lies of that no good so and so, Newt Gingrich. Pundits nicknamed him “Mr. Irrelevant.” The late night TV comedians were making jokes about “Mr. Irrelevant” and how he was already planning a new career for 1997. Clinton's certain impending certain defeat was a hot topic.
In the middle of this I was quoted in the Boston Globe as predicting Clinton would win in a landslide, citing that the opposition party traditionally does well on the mid-term election. The writer was Steve Morse, and I made the prediction on stage in my act after a couple of bits making fun of Mr. Clinton.
By the time 1996 rolled around everyone had forgotten that anyone had ever called him “Mr. Irrelevant.” I said otherwise in the Boston Globe. Reporter Steve Morse saw my show and Morse wrote in the Globe that,
“In addition to being a very good comedian, Donovan also offered some keen political insight, suggesting that Clinton will win in a landslide.”
Clinton's margin of victory over Dole wasn't a landslide but it was close to it.
OKLAHOMA IS NOT OK, APRIL 19, 1995
Horror struck America on the morning of April 19, 1995. A terrorist attack destroyed a large modern federal office building in Oklahoma City. A homemade bomb made of fertilizer and car-racing fuel hidden in a Ryder Truck (bad publicity for poor Ryder) blew half of the building away. 168 people perished and 800 more injured.
There was a 50-state cry against the no good Arab bums who certainly did this. Then a state trooper arrested one of the criminals responsible for the deed on route I-35. The man in custody was not, it turns out, an Arab. He was a white whiffle-head American named Timothy McVeigh. What was even worse, McVeigh was a former soldier in the United States Army and had served honorably in the Kuwaiti Conflict of 1991.
Both McVeigh and Nichols had been members of ‘Charlie Company’ when it was stationed at Fort Riley Kansas.
What’s with Charlie Company? William Calley’s unit that massacred the huddled old men women and children at My Lai 4 in Vietnam in 68 was also called ‘Charlie Company.’ The two worst military atrocities of US history were both the work of Charlie Company.
The Oklahoma City bombing had large political significance and repercussions. New laws were passed to make it easier for prosecutors to seek the death penalty in federal cases. The Bush-Ashcroft reactionary rollback on civil and constitutional rights began under Clinton - Reno.
Terry Nichols only got life in prison for his part. McVeigh was guillotined. If Nichols had done the deed after the new laws he inspired, he would be dead today. It recalls the case of Miranda, the man responsible for the reading to a suspect their ‘Miranda rights.’ The real Miranda, after an initial arrest that led to the Miranda law, was later arrested for murder and literally was read his Miranda rights, or his “me rights.”
American Patriotism ran high after the bombing, but on the other hand the right-wing of the country was given a black eye on two counts. Firstly, the overwhelming erroneous blaming of the Arabs was egg on their redneck face. I was one of those guilty of this mistake but it was with more ‘wait and see’ caution than many of the shocking talk show hosts I heard in my car radio.
The OK KO also discredited the right-wing militia groups that had become popular in rural areas, especially the Idaho, Montana region. The new militia hated the federal government, as opposed to traditional militia which protected it. These two sick rats were part of this movement and nothing could have damaged their cause more. Suddenly it was unhip even in patriotic circles to be part of any these ultra-right nut-clubs, these northwest Klansmen without hoods. Militia were no longer cool after OK City, and in that sense these people may have not died in vain. They took the steam out of the sails of an evil ship. Perhaps something even worse could have eventually happened if these para-military groups had grown to more threatening proportions.
19 children were among those killed. One poor rescue worker the next day pulled on a child’s toy and an arm came up with the toy. We can presume that Nichols will remain in the safety of solitary confinement during his incarceration.
The truck-bomb exploded at 9:02 a.m.
WELFARE REFORM ACT OF 1996
The president got his welfare act passed in 1996, making it tougher for people to get on Welfare and tougher to stay on it. The Bill forced Welfare recipients to seek work. Clinton was playing to the conservative base of American voters at the risk of offending some on the left.
Welfare is a sensitive pride issue. In 1976 I found myself down and out in Los Angeles and a lot of people told me to apply for Welfare from the state of California. I refused and stayed in homeless shelters for a week until I found a job as a telephone solicitor for the Pasadena Star News. But the moral of the story is not my moral superiority, but rather my sin of pride, which is pretentious posturing. I should have taken the Welfare and then got of of it voluntarily at the first opportunity.
I had been willing to collect government unemployment checks in 1975 when I had a roof over my head, but I was suddenly too good to take temporary housing and food money from the government in 1976 when I had no place to sleep.
The name of the 1996 Bill was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. I've never been particularly passionate about Welfare Reform. A lot people use welfare issue as a beard for their racism against blacks. In other words if they lived in West Virginia instead of Chicago or Los Vegas they wouldn't be so angry about all the people on welfare.
KHOBAR TOWERS JUNE 25 1996 – FREEH WILLY
Arab terrorists attacked a US barracks in Saudi Arabia on 6.25.96, killing 19 people.
The method was truck bomb, in this case driven by Timothy Abdullah Azziz McVeigh.
President Clinton promised the nation that the those responsible for this cowardly deed will be tracked down and punished. But he never really backed it up. All evidence pointed to Iran being behind this one. But Clinton didn't want to get tough with Iran. He wanted to court better relations with Iran.
When Iran changed presidents a year later, the Clinton Administration began to deliberately reduce it's effort to find and prosecute those responsible. This is all straight out of Louis Freeh's book, My FBI.
Clinton developed a bad relationship with his FBI Director. Freeh went more than two years at a time without speaking to the President one time.
Sandy Berger worked with Freeh to some extent, but Freeh believed that Berger conducted national security with an eye over his shoulder for political gain. Berger was always weighing how this or that would affect Clinton's chance for re-election, or Democrat fortunes in Congressional elections, which offended Freeh who thought that national security issues should be conducted without partisan political motivations. Louis was naïve that way.
Louis wanted to get FBI access to several detainees being held by the Saudis, but no one in the Clinton Administration would do anything to facilitate this. Freeh got the run-around, and couldn't get near anyone of importance in the top Saudi brass. So Freeh called his old friend ex-Prez George Herb Walker Bush, “Bush 41.” George said he was meeting with Prince Bandahar soon and would raise the issue with him. Sure enough, the Prince saw to it that the FBI could at least listen in while Saudi interrogators asked the prisoners questions submitted by the FBI, although the Saudis would not allow the FBI to question Saudi terrorist suspects in the Khobar Towers attack directly. If not for the intervention of the former President, the FBI director would have failed to even get an interview with a suspect.
One thing Freeh and the FBI was worried about was the Saudi tactic of executing suspects before the Americans got a chance to question them, as had happened in the past. Suspects in an earlier terror attack were beheaded before the FBI could talk to them, and some American officials thought this was slick and deliberate because the criminals might have revealed a little too much about Saudi government passivity or worse in these attacks on Americans in Arabia.
Freeh consistently complains in his book (40 hours of interviews ghosted into a book) that Clinton always handed out the tough rhetoric and then behind the scenes made weak calls on national security.
POWELL DOCTRINE
Colin Powell wrote a memo in 94 that became known as the “Powell Doctrine.” The Chairman of the JCS set down several conditions that must be met before he would advise American military intervention. There must be public support, there has to a way out (“exit strategy,”) other nations had to back America up. there had to be a political gain in mind, and the troops should not be asked to stay extensively anywhere while taking casualties.
Colin (the black left called him Tom) Powell set this down in writing after the Somalia fiasco, partly to make sure that no more Black Hawk Down movies could be made. Clinton kept the PD in mind. The PD probably precluded any intervention in force on Iraq in Clinton times. It applied in Haiti in 1994 and in Yugoslavia in 1995.
Near the end of the term came the SD, the Shineski doctrine. General Eric “Shin-bone” Shineski was the US Army chief of staff. He came up with a new concept in US war-making where a medium sized force with high-tech weaponry with brilliant planning would have the new capability of intervening in force anywhere in the world within four days, and get back without any deep permanent intervention on the ground. SD sort of cancelled out the PD. Shineski-think was inherited by the Rumsfeld gang when W took over and they spun it in their own fantasy way to the tenth power - Shineski-think helped create the misguided idea that the US could conquer Iraq and hold it with a mere 125,000 troops. Of course Shineski could argue that the 2003 war was not something he would gave approved of, but he inspired that thinking with his own work in the Clinton years.
TWA FLIGHT 800 – DEATH OVER LONG ISLAND
The hits just keep on comin'. This was a bad stretch for America.
At dusk on July 17 1996 a TWA 747 jet en route from New York to Paris exploded at 13,000 feet over Long Island Sound. It happened 11 minutes into the flight. All 230 people on board died. It's hard to believe that at least half of these people didn't survive.
A federal investigation concluded that the TWA 800 blew up because of a leak in the fuel tank, combined with a badly timed spark. But there are lots of conspiracy theories as to the true cause.
The most widely believed theory is that a surface-to-air missile shot from the ground in Long Island brought the jet down. Many witnesses on the ground swear to have seen a streak of light move from the ground to the plane, and then saw the plane explode. The pilot sent out a Mayday call, which would be inconsistent with a sudden internally sparked explosion.
Another theory contends that that plane was sabotaged, but that it was done with a high-tech bomb smuggled on board with a timing device.
It seems probable that the USA was attacked by terrorists, probably Islamic radicals, on July 17 1996. That these bodies can be added to the national terrorist victims memorial. They are forever linked politically with the victims of September 11, 2001.
George W. Bush may have overreacted to the terrorist threat in 2003 when he invaded Iraq, but there had been a general sense of America getting pushed around by Arab radicals building up to his invasion for 30 years. TWA 800 is no small contribution to this buildup to war.
Clinton couldn't respond directly to fight 800, since the Arab connection could not be proven.
Today, Mrs. Clinton is trying to keep things cool in the Middle East as Obama's Secretary of State. I think Mrs. Clinton is a fine Secretary of State.
WHO THE HELL IS AL KAIDA AND WHY DOES HE HATE US SO MUCH? 1996
Defense Secretary William Perry had never heard of a man named Osama bin Laden, nor of an organization called al Qaeda. He wasn't alone. No one in the FBI, the DIA, the NSC, the CIA or the NFL had ever heard of him or it either.
Al qaeda (pronounced “al qaeda”) and Osama in 1996 declared war on the United States. When Germany declared war on the United States in 1941, it did so from the Chancellery in Berlin. In this case the declaration of war came from a cave in Afghanistan. This was probably one of the reasons the FBI and other government agencies didn't take it all that seriously at the time.
Why does he hate Uncle Sam so much? What inspires such hatred? Firstly Osama was an Islamic lunatic stuck in the mind-set of 980 a.d.
Officially he was declaring war on America because of the presence of United States (infidel) troops on sacred Islamic (Saudi) soil. They had been there for five years after the War for Kuwait in 1991. Then there was a whole laundry list of things that he hated about the west. He threatened to kill all Americans and bragged that his warriors loved death the way Americans loved life. He specifically blamed Defense Secretary Perry for the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and made his threat a personal one,
“Mr. Perry, my warriors will chop you up and put you on ice. You will be known as 'Refrigerator Perry' when I am done with you. Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation.”
The FBI agents reading all this were befuddled. Who is this guy and why is he so mad at us? What did we ever do to him?
In November the FBI questioned a Saudi guy who had run off with $100,000 of Osama's cash, emigrating to the USA with it. This turn-towel revealed a great deal about al Qaida to the FBI. He told of an elaborate terrorist network all over the world, very well financed and very hell bent on killing Americans anywhere anyhow, and that included women, children and even their pets.
Agent Dan Coleman tired to bring this story to other branches of the government security apparatus, but got nowhere. Some agencies didn't even return his calls.
Al Kaida and Osama brought down the World Trade Center a few years later.
UNLIMITED ACCESS 1996
The Clintons tried to stop it from being published. But a book by an FBI agent, who had been stationed inside the Clinton White House, was published in the summer of 96. Unlimited Access, by Gary Aldrich of the FBI made number one on the New York Times bestseller list in August of 1996.
Gary’s book was an FBI raid on Clinton's morals. Aldrich hit hard. For example, was there illegal drug use in the Clinton White House?
Yes. Many of the hippies working for Clinton admitted to illegal drug use, according to Aldrich.
Aldrich is way too partisan and hateful for my taste. UL didn't make me mad at Clinton because the style of the accuser off-set the author's accusations, even when they stuck.
ELECTION OF 1996 - OVERVIEW
Bob Dole was the Republican nominee and he never even got close. There wasn't even one week where he surged and seemed like he might make it close. Clinton had the election in his back pocket before 1996 began. It was the most boring political race in my lifetime because it wasn't even a race. At least Dukakis had a late surge and hoped to surprise.
The 1984 campaign was just as lopsided as 1996, but it wasn't boring because Reagan and the more controversial times made it so.
DNC – LAROUCHE CHALLENGER
At the DNC Clinton faced only one challenger. Lyndon LaRouche, possibly the worst human being in the history of America politics, ran for president and won 5% of the vote in the Democratic primaries. The Democratic Party refused to seat his three or four pledged delegates from Arkansas.
I don't know how one person could vote for him, let alone 5% of registered Democrats. LaRouche is such an extremist lunatic that he defies being called a right wing or a left wing lunatic. He's just a lunatic. Every time there is a major election going on I run into his Larouche-bag supporters outside some bank or government building with posters and flyers claiming that Kissinger is a Nazi who sold America out to the international world government conspiracy, and by the way, I mean even in 2012, when Kissinger is like a hundred years old and can't even drag himself out to do a TV interview in a shaky voice. They were still all over Kissinger is a Nazi in 2012. Anyone they hate gets a Hitler mustache on one of their flyers or posters. In 2008 it was Obama in a Hitler mustache. Many years ago I made the mistake of arguing with them on the street. I've come to learn that is exactly what they want. Now I walk by them and laugh and shake my head, which is the only correct approach to these clowns. LaRouche in 1984 campaigned for President, claiming that Mr. Reagan and Queen Elizabeth of England were conspiring to sell both countries out to a one-world government dominated by ex-Nazis.
LaRouche is so corrupt that he landed in federal prison more than one time. Admittedly, it was on tax charges, which means the government considered him too dangerous and hostile for safe tolerance, so they manipulate the tax stats and put him in jail, which, scarily, the government can do to almost anyone.
LaRouche ran against Clinton in 1996 from Federal prison. We could make an analogy between he and Eugene Debs, the Socialist who ran for President from prison in 1920, but that would be an atrocity against a good man named Gino.
Lyndon LaRouche makes Lyndon Johnson look like the most lovable politician of all time.
RNC 96
The Republican field was so wide open that they killed themselves beating each other up and let Clinton walk in the front door. A united team spirit Republican effort behind a single talented candidate might have made the race close, but every candidate came out of the Republican fight covered in bandages like a cartoon character after a bomb went off. Nominee Dole came out with far more figurative war injuries than the ones he had in real life from his fighting in World War II.
The Republican field at the end of 1995 included no less than 14 names.
There was Bob Dole of Kansas, who eventually won the nomination. Dole was a WWII veteran and a veteran Kansas Senator. Dole had run hard for the nomination against GHW Bush in 1992, and his nasty sarcastic tongue when Bush beat him precluded him from getting the VP nod instead, something he no doubt would have accepted.
There was Pat Buchanan, the famous right wing jerk who used to write speeches for Nixon, and had a talent for alienating everyone but his most ardent supporters.
There was billionaire Steve Forbes who's never had to earn a penny in his life and decided to buy some fame by running for President. he had so much money he had nothing to lose. Forbes was a dorky looking guy who made himself temporarily handsome when he got hot in politics.
There was Lamar Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee who went around in a flannel shirt like that was going to fool everyone into thinking he wasn't a rich privileged politician. He talked like a pitch-man for an aspirin commercial and I found that plastic tenor to be a total turn off. Alexander has remained in the US Senate to the present day writing of 2011.
There was Senator Phil Graham of Texas who was bald with glasses and had a bad Texas accent. Like he was going to compete with cutie-pie Clinton at crunch time. I liked his policies, but I knew he never had a chance. Everyone knew it but Phil Graham.
There was Alan Keyes, of Illinois, the most caustic vituperative nasty condescending maniacally self-righteous politician in all of American history in the TV age. Keyes couldn't handle any question without a condemning lecture at the expense of everyone else. Keyes is my least favorite politician of all time, period. He ran again in 2000 and again yelled at all the other candidates for no reason at all with a windbag lecture every-time anyone gave him the floor. This is the man that Barak Obama beat to win the Illinois Senate race.
There was Dick Lugar who was nice and articulate and experienced, but no one really knew him outside of “political junkies” and he didn't have the charisma to compensate.
There was Bob Dorman the California Congressman who was way too far to the right even for me, but was so articulate and sincere that if somehow he had won, I might have had to vote for him.
There was Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector, a man I cannot assess fairly because he wanted to bring formal charges against my New England Patriots football team when it was revealed that they had spied on their opponents at their practices. He only got high and mighty about it because they had beaten HIS team, the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. This happened long after 1996, but I'm just saying I can't assess this guy fairly, as I didn't start writing my history book until 2004, after the football nonsense went down. I can't recall how I felt about him at the time in 1996, which might say a lot about his lack of pizazz, since I remember well my feelings at the time towards most of the others.
There was Pete Wilson of California; likeable, articulate, but just not a household name.
There was Morry Taylor, a businessman who like Forbes, just was in it to buy his fame, and I guess that's as good a product to purchase with your dough as anything else. Unlike Forbes, Taylor wasn't born a billionaire.
There was rich businessman Charles. E. Collins, and I have no recollection that he ever existed.
And last but least was Harold Stassen who'd been around since the JFK era (unless he's a Junior and I got that wrong.)
Billionaire Steve Forbes won the Arizona primary and then went after Dole in New Hampshire. Forbes ran TV attack ads that went beyond anything I had ever seen,
Voiceover puke guy,
“Bob Dole wants to raise your taxes.
Bob Dole is a member of the Ku Klux Klan
and the nation of Islam.
Bob Dole beats his wife... and little puppies.
Bob Dole favors the legalization of crack cocaine,
and its free distribution in all of our public schools.
Bob Dole's war injury is a fake. He really hurt his
arm in a knife fight with a hooker.
Bob Dole, a very bad man.
(second voice-over voice) – Paid for by Steve Forbes.”
The incredible viciousness of the Forbes ads was the talk of the national news. I'm slightly changing the content for fun, but not the essential tone.
Steve Forbes wouldn't have been able to run for town selectman of Egg Harbor New Jersey if he hadn't been born rich and famous. His father was the famous founder of Forbes magazine, the rag to help the rich ( I can't believe I let my subscription run out). SF was a patently unattractive man by disco standards, and even Dole could have picked up a woman at a bar faster than Forbes, and Forbes was 20 years younger. So you've got Forbes and Ross Perot both unashamedly trying to buy the Presidency. There's nothing illegal about it, but that's what they were trying to do.
Louisiana's Lamar Alexander talked like a TV pitchman from a 1965 commercial. He had an unbearable plastic cadence. Even Al Gore was complaining, “That guy's a phony!” Alexander made a weak gimmick out of touring the nation in a flannel shirt instead of a suit and tie. We get it, Lamar. You're a down to earth man of the people. Nice try, Bozo.
California Congressman Bob Dornan was a conservative's conservative. I regret to say that I liked him a lot. He wasn't shrewd. The other Bob D didn't try to be all things to all sides. My left wing friends hated Dornan, endearing me to him that much more. The guy actually stood for something.
Congressman Dornan had a real problem with hippie Clintons' 1968 trip to Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War, and made it one of his key talking points. I liked his cadence. Dornan seemed like the kind of guy I could drive cross-country with. Maybe he was too extreme, too neo-Goldwater, too Reagan without clout. Maybe it was inevitable that someone that hard right couldn't win the Republican nomination. But if he had won the nomination I certainly would have voted for him in the national election. And I certainly didn't vote for Bob Dole.
Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania can go jump into the icy North Atlantic in a November storm for all I care. Not because he was a bad Republican candidate for President in 1996. It's because after the New England Patriots tackle football team won their third Super Bowl in the 0's there was a minor scandal accusing them of spying on the other team during their practices and then using that information to help them win. Then Arlin Spector wouldn't let up on how this required a Congressional investigation and how he was going to press charges against their coach Bill Belechek. Spector made a fool of himself with that one. It was obviously only because the Patriots beat his beloved Philadelphia Eagles team that
he had such a moral take on this. No other member of Congress gave a millionth of an ounce about this pathetically unimportant matter. Arlen was just being a specteracular baby sore loser. If Philly qb Donovan McNabb had passed accurately instead of erratically, Philly would have won by ten.
Richard Lugar threatened to take out a pistol if he didn't win the nomination, but he still didn't get very far.
Pat Buchanan was Nixon's former speechwriter and also penned the great speeches of Spiro Agnew. He is an isolationist redneck, and is on TV more often than Whoopie Goldberg and Katie Couric combined. Every thought he has ever had on anything has appeared on national television.
I think Don Imus said it best when he make this joke about Buchanan at the White House Correspondents Dinner,
“A lot of people don't kow this about Pat, but his uncle died in Nazi concentration camp during World War II. He was drunk and fell out of the guard tower.”
It got a mixed laugh, and of course it is an unfair exaggeration. But humor is the ruthless mirror that tells all, and just the fact that Imus would dare tell such a joke says all you need to know about Pat Buchanan. I wouldn't read one of his books if I was on a desert island and it was the only printed material in the survival bag.
ROSS PEROT
This grating egomaniac ran again in 1996 after messing up the election for GHW Bush in 1992. This time the redneck progressive billionaire gnome formed a new political party to justify his selfish quest for personal attention. The Reform Party only existed as an excuse to win one man his power, and a few million people were astonishingly stupid enough to buy it. Don Imus said about him in 1992, “Ross Perot is the single phoniest person on this planet.” Rite on, bro. And I do apologize for quoting Don Imus twice in the same lifetime.
Without Perot, Dole makes it closer, but I doubt if RP's absence would have been enough to turn it around for.
“OLD MAN LOOK AT MY LIFE, I'M NOT A LOT LIKE YOU ARE”
My brother Patrick told me during the campaign, “I don't think Bob Dole is a bad candidate. He's got some good ideas. He's going to die the next time he catches a cold, but I like some of his ideas.” I used that in my act and it clicked because the perception was dead on.
That's how the voters saw Bob Dole. He was just too damn old. I was a Republican at the time and sometimes I screamed it in my house, just walking around doing chores; “He's too damn old! He doesn't have prayer!” It was so frustrating to see my party nominate this guy who was older than half the people in today's obituary column.
It made sense in a senseless way. You can't take the nomination away from him. He earned it. So what if he can't win. It was Goldwater revisited. It was all about party power, political infrastructure, and political traditions. It certainly wasn't about trying to nominate someone who could win. The Republicans ran the oldest guy in the field against the young good-looking incumbent. Gee, I wonder what could go wrong for the Republicans on this one.
As comedian Bob Lazarus put it,
“It's not that I don't like Dole. But he's 71! My grandfather is 71, and he is out of his mind!”
The Republicans did the same thing in 2008! If W Bush had been 75 when he ran in 2000 he would have lost to Al Gore. It's a cruel reality, but unless you're an historian, old age produces diminishing returns in the working world, and that certainly includes politicians. Society allows for old politicians quite well, but it does not allow for very old politicians, not in the highest office, not anymore. Jim Buchanan was elected as an old man, but that was 1856. LBJ came in fairly old, but he rode young JFK's bloody coat-tails. Ike was the last successful old guy to win on his own, and he only made it because he was the hero of the biggest war in all of human history.
I know what you're going to say. What about Reagan. He was old and he won. Reagan won at 71 but he was exceptionally nice-looking and he dyed his hair. A Steve Martin/Barbara Bush white-haired Reagan doesn't win in 1980, period. And a 76 year old Reagan could never have won his first term in any year.
The Republican Convention was held in San Diego, the first time a major Party Convention was ever held there. I was at a minor party convention there in 1976 at the Neptune Hotel. When the guys broke out the heroin, I fled. That is a true story, and the Neptune no longer exists, thank God. Eleven dollars a night is all you need to know.
Pat Buchanan fought hard for a prime time speaking slot and lost. Gerald Ford gave the opening night speech and brought down the house .... when he tripped over a bunch of wires and set off the balloon and confetti drop that was supposed to happen on the fourth and final evening.
RESULTS
As usual, the Democrats took all of the Northeast, the west coast and the Great Lakes midwest. As usual the Republicans hoped to scrape up enough votes from a slew of smaller states in the South and west to make up for what they couldn't win in the heavily populated industrial states. The red and blue map in 1996 resembled the election map that Obama won in 2008.
New York is in the bag for the Dems with a yawn, and Wyoming is in the bag for the Republicans with a yawn. Do you see the problem here for the Republicans?
Clinton won 49% of the popular vote and Dole took 40. Ross Perot took the other 8%, with 3% going to fringe dopes.
DICK MORRIS DEPARTS
On the night that Clinton gave his acceptance speech, his good friend and advisor Dick Morris resigned in disgrace after a tabloid rag revealed (or was about to) that he had spent a night with a hooker. There were photographs of him and the bimbo on a balcony laughing and whispering and whatever.
It must have been weird for a man like Bill Clinton to have to accept Dick's resignation for cheating on his wife. How could they both not burst out laughing at some point?
Morris went on to write a lot of books about the Clintons and the inside the beltway scene. His first book was rather kind to the Clintons but then the books got mean. Now it seems like he hates Clinton with a psychopathic consistency. Clinton was the guy who gave him such power and name recognition. It doesn't seem right. Morris claims to have been a good friend of Bill Clinton for 20 years. What he's done in the past ten years to Clinton more than off-sets that alleged friendship.
SCANDAL SHEET
PAULA JONES AT THE EXCELSIOR
The woman who started the impeachment ball rolling was named Paula Jones. The left made fun of her for her big hair, her lack of D.C sophistication, and her southern accent. Her husband was the famous actor Stephen Jones who appeared in the Oscar winning film Mystery Train in 1989, for which he won a Golden Globe. Let me take that back. Her husband Stephen was an aspiring actor who appeared in one scene as the ghost of Elvis Presley in the remarkably obscure 1989 film Mystery Train. Because Stephen Jones was an aspiring to a career in show business, the Clinton defenders emphasize this as the reason he tried to exploit an incident in which then Governor Bill Clinton exposed himself to Jones' wife in a hotel room against her will. As if everyone you and I know in the United States of America isn't aspiring to be a success in show business; as if that's really a telling factoid towards understanding his true lack of character.
February 11, 1994 was the date that the country first learned of Paula Jones and the alleged incident with Bill Clinton back in 1991. The event was the 14th annual CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Jones spoke at the podium while, beside her stood three of the Arkansas State Troopers who claimed that they had illegally enabled governor Clinton to be a serial infidel on state government time.
Paula did not give graphic details, and the fact that she was speaking out at a partisan right-wing gathering did not make her story seem overtly credible.
Washington Post reporter Michael ‘Izzy’ Isikoff was assigned to interview Jones and was skeptical. The Post is a liberal newspaper, the same one the gave us Woodward and Bernstein, the scoops who essentially toppled President Nixon by breaking the Watergate scandal to the public (while Woodward was helping to create it.)
Isikoff found, to his surprise, that Jones was highly credible, and, what’s more, that her corroborating witnesses were even more credible. She spilled her guts to Isikoff in full detail.
I have tapes of Jones speaking to the press and I find her to be completely believable. Clinton defenders still insist what a liar she is, but I can make a fair judgement for myself. So I will not describe the incident with Miss Jones as alleged but rather as something that happened. Clinton defenders pointed out with glee that PJ was unsophisticated and not rich and not too bright. If so, then all the more reason that she would not be capable of pulling off a spectacular lie before national media cameras in anything close to convincing manner.
Paula Corbin Jones was a state employee with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. She was working a registration desk at a management conference at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel in 1991 when Governor Clinton arrived to give a scheduled speech. Jones and one of her female friends noticed that Clinton was staring over the cameras at Jones Soon a state trooper came over to them and informed Paula that Clinton said that she “made his knees knock.” What was more, he asked her to meet him in his hotel room and the trooper gave her a slip of paper with the Governor’s room number. She went up there and he exposed himself and asked for oral. She flipped out and ran from the room.
Clinton defenders would later say that Paula knew darned well what he was after and that therefore, she was virtually consenting to a sexual encounter, when she agreed to go up there.
First of all a woman has a right to be treated like a woman even after giving signals that she might be willing to put out. Even an “easy” woman still wants (needs) the man to go through some social rituals, to lend at least a playful veneer of respect, and make her more feminine a prize in the process. A lady who lets some stranger, no matter how famous to just drop his pants
without being asked is no longer a lady. She drops from a loose lady to a cheap slut, and there is a light year of difference between the two. Men, in general, like loose women. Men, in general, don't like shameless sluts. Clinton had lost his ability to even care anymore that there was a difference. His fame and power had obviously pushed a few loose women over the border into slut-land, and now he just presumed he could make Paula turn slut on short notice.
Apparently some other women had agreed to this behavior or else he wouldn't have felt so comfortable asking for it.
It's quite possible that Clinton could have scored Paula right then and there if he had put at least some minimal effort into seducing her like a real polished cad. Paula might have been walking into danger hoping to stop herself from cheating but falling into zone of temptation willingly enough. Who knows what might happen if this sexy handsome and powerful man said the right thing. 'Protect me from myself!' she might have thought as he dazzled her. But when he whipped it out she turned into an injured animal. 'How dare you think you can have me by just dropping your pants!' is what she ended up thinking.
Paula was at least willing to forget about it, maybe because her husband never knew about it. She might have not told Mystery Train Jones the whole story right away, since it meant that he'd know that she had gone up to the hotel room alone with Bill Clinton.
Who wouldn't want to meet the governor of their state, with or without sexual overtones? I would have agreed to meet him in his room, while praying that this wasn't a sexual advance. Jones was a state worker. Not only would it be a thrill to meet such a celebrity but he was also her boss. It would be odd to say no. 'Jonesie' admits that she found him attractive. Paula had a young son and a husband. She was torn. She was the female Ashley Wilkes, “She can't stay mentally faithful to her husband but won't technically be unfaithful.” She was walking this tightrope as she went to his room.
Paula entered Clinton's room and what took place happened with lightning speed. They began making small talk and suddenly he grabbed her hand and would not let go. Bill began pressing her against a window until until she broke away. He followed her and pressed against her as she stood in front of a large chair. “I will never forget that look on his face … His face was just red, beet red, I swear it was. Oh it was horrible!”
Now the governor suddenly slipped his hand up her leg and into her culottes. She backed away again protesting, “What are you doing?”
Now he was forcibly trying to kiss her on the neck and saying things like, “I was looking at your curves and the way you walked around the front of the table and I love the way your hair came down your back, the middle of your back and your curves.”
This account is from the remarkable book Uncovering Clinton by Isikoff c) 1999, the book all the Clinton defenders debunk by attacking Isikoff personally. At this point in her telling the story she interjected to Isikoff, “I mean, the man is just a pervert!”
Paula fled to a sofa on the other side of the room.
Clinton came over as he loosened his tie, and sat down next to her. She told the governor that she had to get going now. Clinton responded with the immortal line,
“You don’t have to go just yet, cupcakes.”
Very romantic, a line right out of page 343 of Lady Chatterly's Lover.
The next time Paula dared to glance over at him he had his pants and boxer shorts down to his knees and was playing with his pud asking her for oral sex “in a very disgusting way, just a horny-ass way that just scared me to death.” Paula protested in horror that she was not that type of person and wanted to leave now. Clinton pulled his pants back up and told her not to worry, that she would not get into any trouble. Wow; That she did not have to worry, that she would not get into any trouble! That says it all about his state of mind and how much he as used to getting away with. The exact quote was, “If you have any trouble have Dave Harrington contact me immediately.”
Escaping back to the ground floor Paula told the story to her female friend who later gave sworn testimony that Jones was clearly trembling and “very shaken up.” PCJ told the story to others very soon after it happened, and there is no reason to believe that any of these corroborating witnesses had anything to gain by inventing the story. They all had the same details and the same observation: Paula Jones was all shook up, like she had just seen the ghost of Elvis Presley.
One of the dominant issues in American politics for Clinton's first term was whether Paula Jones was a liar. One of the dominant political issues in American politics for Clinton's second term was whether Monica Lewinski was a liar. Well one thing we do know for sure after the Monica Lewinski things played out. Bill Clinton is a proven liar. Paula is a maybe liar.
When Pittsburgh Steeler QB Ben Roethlesburger was accused of sexual harassment the first time, most people held off making judgement and said, who knows? His word against hers. When it happened a second time, everyone said, where there's smoke, there's fire and the consensus was guilty. Big Ben was never convicted of a crime, but the NFL suspended him for six games as punishment for the appearance of impropriety. I wish the same standards were applied to Clinton that were later applied to Roethlesburger. Clinton defenders heard 28 different horror stories from 28 women and conclude that its all a vast conspiracy. They discredit each of these women one at a time as white trash or opportunist lying old diggers. They say that it was only because Clinton was rich and powerful and his enemies were out to get him that these allegations became so believed.
Well then, why didn't 28 different women accuse W. Bush of the same thing. He had just as many political enemies. He was just as rich and powerful as Clinton. Why did no bimbos try to blackmail this guy with invented stories in order to force him to pay them off to keep quiet. No, only Clinton had to face such a remarkable conspiracy producing one false charge after another.
The Jones story was first exploded by the Washington Post, so it could hardly be a story magnified in order to carry out a right-wing political agenda. Yet that would be the spin put on it by an endless parade of Clinton apologists. In fact, the reporter, Michael “Izzy” Isikoff found that his own editors were going out of their way to try and downplay the story.
Stephanopulos the Clinton soldier, a New Bedford born FOB made an angry call to a key Post editor and managed to put the story off. An angry Izzy called Stephanopoulos, who said that Clinton did not even know the woman! “It’s just a cheap political fundraising trick,” Steph declared with certainty. Isikoff fought a running battle with several Post editors who chose to believe that he did not have enough evidence for the paper to print the story. This even led to a blowup with one editor that led to the Post suspending Isikoff for two weeks. Word of the Post confrontation leaked out and the conservative press made it a headline story. The Post was covering up for Bill Clinton and suppressing a clearly damaging story. The Post was claiming that the reporter did not have enough evidence, not that it was out to suppress a valid piece. But the Post probably would not have had such high evidence standards if the target had been a Republican president.
As the story grew, other papers began to show a willingness to speak out and, not wanting to be scooped on their own scoop, the Post finally caved in to the evidence and began printing. In the meantime, Isikoff quit his Post and moved on to Newsweek in protest.
The Post should have known that the story had legs. The Post office gossip vine had long ago filed away an untoward story about Clinton’s behavior at the March 23 1991 Washington Gridiron Dinner, a fun night where the press and the big politicians subject each other annually to friendly “roasting’ by comedians and skit players. Clinton had been seated with two distinguished older women, but had his mind elsewhere. A young female Post religion reporter from Arkansas named Laura Sessions Stepp caught his Roman eye. After the event ended he moved in on her, introduced himself and shook her hand. Then, the predictable happened. He wouldn’t let go. He kept staring at her, wouldn’t let go of her hand and said that she really had to look him up sometime in Little Rock. The moment lingered painfully. He repeated his idea for her to look him up and continued to hold her hand as she tried to pull it away. Laura had no doubt that this was abnormal behavior and that he was trying to pick her up. She complained to her editor, the venerable David Broder, and Broder was angry. Clinton had attended the event as the guest of the Post and the incident was rude to say the least.
I would like to pause for a moment to add an original story, based on hearsay. I know a writer and stand-up comedian whom I worked with for several years in the clubs, a fine man and a scholastic genius, whom I will call John. When Clinton was president-elect John told me a story. John had a close friend, an attractive female, (whom we will call Mary) who had grown up in Arkansas and had known the Clinton family. As luck would have it, John was invited to a dinner with the lady, and Bill Clinton was one of the guests. At one point Bill Clinton took my pal John aside and said to him, “You are one lucky man. I have had my eye on Mary since she was a little girl.”
“It wasn’t normal,” John told me. “He was pretending to be polite but it wasn’t. It kind of made me mad and it definitely gave me the creeps.”
Needless to say that story stuck with me and as the Clinton sex scandals crashed over America in an endless wave I thought of my original John and Mary and Bill story many times. The Clinton tree of sexual disrespect has so many branches that one of them even found its way into my world of stand-up comedians and my circle of acquaintances! (John by the way does not like the Republican Party at all and has zero political motive to recall this story.)
And then you get books like “A Vast Conspiracy” by Toobin claiming that all the Clinton accusers were liars or political ambulance chasers. The guy belonged in the big house, not the White House.
Democrats defend this man blindly. In January of 2005 I bought three used books on Clinton at a local bookstore in 90% liberal Brookline, Massachusetts. The sales clerk a woman of about 75 years commented to me as she rang them up. “I don’t care what anyone says. I will always defend that man.” Well said. No matter what the evidence, I will blindly make a fool of myself, my party, my political beliefs and my sexual gender. She followed up by lambasting George W. Bush in comparison as a no-good liar as she bagged them and sent me on my way. It never crossed her mind that 1)- I might not agree, and 2- I don't need her disagreeable political lectures, even if I agreed with them. Just bag the books, bag, and bag the editorials.
SIXTY MINUTESS GIVES AMERICA THE WILLIES
In late 1998 CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a dramatic tearful interview with a woman named Kathleen Willey who claimed Clinton had sexually assaulted her in the Oval Office she was sexually assaulted by the president. Kathy was an old friend of Bill and went to see him about a personal problem. Willey says that Clinton kissed her on the mouth against her will and then grabbed her hand and forced it onto his crotch and directly on his willy.
ENTER THE BIG BIMBO
The chain of bimbos ultimately led to the queen bimbo, the woman who has a name in world history far more prominent than several million noble people who deserve it more. We speak of course about Ms. Monica Lewinski.
Basically it went like this. Clinton exposed himself in a sick sexual episode with Paula Jones. Paula Jones finally went public and gave Kathleen Willey the courage to drop a phone call to the Jones lawyer saying the same thing had happened to her. Then Willey backed down and decided she did not want to go public.
Now reporters and lawyers were all trying to find Willey and trying to get her to testify. But no one could do either until a “friend” of Willey was contacted, the also soon to be famous Linda Tripp. LT confirmed Willey’s story of the sexual encounter between Kathleen and Bill but Tripp contradicted the Willey story. According to Tripp, the sexual encounter had been consensual, that Willey had been trying to get into Clinton’s pants for some time and had finally succeeded. Reporters concluded, rightly, that whichever version was correct; the President had still had sexual activities in the White House on the taxpayer’s dime in flagrant violation of all sense of propriety. This was a sensational story. There were now motions being filed to subpoena Willey in the Jones case as a witness to Clintons behavioral pattern of sexual harassment.
In the course of spilling the Clinton beans to reporters, Linda Tripp had mentioned that there were a whole string of women that Clinton was fooling around with in the White House. What's more, it was common knowledge, in fact, that the president was having an ongoing affair right now with a 23-year young intern. It was an open secret around the office water coolers. The young intern was servicing him orally in a room off to the side of the Oval Office and was sharing all the juicy details with her pal, Linda. And that is how the Lewinski factor first became added to the equation.
Eventually, Lewdwinski would overshadow all the other scandals and lead to the impeaching of the President. But Mony first came to light as an accidental fourth string attachment to the Paula Jones case. Isikoff, Matt Drudge, and a herd of other reporters and lawyers were trying to get the truth out of Willey in order to tie her up with Jones, who had only gone public because of a Troopergate magazine article in the first place, and Lewinsky fell out of the bag along the way.
Judge Susan Weber Wright in Little Rock eventually threw the Paula Jones lawsuit out on grounds of insufficient proof that the incident had caused her sufficient emotional damage or loss of job performance. But later, (much later) when it was revealed how untruthful Clinton had been in his sworn deposition, Wright held Clinton in contempt of court for his lies (and possible for making a fool out of her.) Suzie blew it. She could have knocked him out, and she missed.
As Clinton knew, he had no chance to spin this one and win unjustly, as rich lawyers can sometimes do. Contempt of court is an incontestable verdict, the only crime a citizen can commit that cannot be appealed or given to a jury for trial. Weber-Wright also levied a $90,000 fine on Mr. Clinton payable to Paula C Jones and her lawyers for his “untruthful statements” before a grand jury.
JUANITA BRODERICK
In February of 1999, DATELINE NBC, not to be outdone by its time slot rival 60 MINUTES, ran an interview with yet another of Clinton’s alleged sexual assault victims.
This time the story ‘had some dust on it” as they say on the police radio. Juanita Brodderick claimed that back in 1978 Clinton had raped her. She wasn’t talking about him grabbing her hand like Willey or dropping his pants like Jones. Brodderick was talking bona fide rape. Brodderick had corroborating witnesses after the fact that saw her torn panty hose and bruised lip. Juanita was sobbing uncontrollably during the interview with tears streaming down her face. Her hatred for Bill Clinton was bottomless.
My close leftist political writer friend, who had told me in biased denial earlier that “I’m sick of hearing of what the guy does with his -----!” this time was a little shaken up. For the first time, he admitted, he was starting to believe it all. “I don’t know,” he struggled in a disturbed tone, “this one seemed very convincing.”
12/97 LEAVE IT TO CROATIA
There were other woman scandals floating up from the bottom of the lake. There was Elizabeth Ward Gracen.
Elizabeth Gracen was a former Miss America and an actress. She had been a sexual playmate of the married Clinton in 1983. But then Clinton had put the Marv Albert moves on her. The sex got rough and Liz Ward Gracen walked around Russellville Arkansas the next day with a bloodied lip. She never pressed charges but the story got around.
Late in 1997 one of the Paula Jones lawyers tracked Gracen down on the phone but Miss America would not answer questions. The press had already roused her up a bit in the 1992 campaign and Gracen wasn’t going to have any of it. She hit the road and vacationed around the Caribbean to beat the press.
Then one of Clinton’s Hollywood movie-maker friends, Thomasson arranged to have Gracen assigned to a made for TV movie being filmed in Croatia. She was an actress after all. Elizabeth could have been a household name like Paula Jones or Kathy Willy, but she avoided press and subpoenas by filming a sit-com in Croatia. Hollywood lent Clinton a helping hand in the Gracen case.
JUDGE WEBBER - 12 1997 – REACTIONARY SCANDAL
In December of 1997 Clinton finally sent in his written answers to questions from Judge Susan Webber.
All of Clinton’s affairs were weaving a spider’s webber to finally catch him. Bill had been surrounded by so many enablers for so many years (including his #1 accomplice, ‘The Hillster’) that it never occurred to him that he could actually find himself in an inescapable bind.
The more powerful he became in his rise in politics the easier it became for him to cheat. He became sexier with more power and more women wanted him. Not only that, he had such a larger and more experienced group of enablers that he could now force himself of women against their will and, if they didn’t like it, he could move on to another conquest like nothing had happened. Santa’s elves could fix the broken toys while he played with new ones. What a system! What a life!
It just never occurred to him that the system would or could reach diminishing returns when you become the President of the USA. The monster he had created was so exiting for him in Arkansas but now it had reached a level where it had a life of it’s own and he could no longer control it. Now the wandering Frankenstein was being monitored by a vigilant mob of spies, both press and Republicans, and their torches were lit.
He knew that the presidency was bigger than the governor’s office, but perhaps it didn’t occur to him just how much more.
To repeat, the Monicagate story was an accident of the investigation into Linda Tripp, conducted by Michael Isikoff after Kathleen Willey had hinted to him that there was someone in the Defense department that knew all the dirt on Clinton including an ongoing affair with a young intern. Izzy deduced that it had to be a certain Linda Tripp and she admitted almost all to him.
Things really got crazy because Tripp was plotting to write a book with an agent named Lucy Goldberg. They led Isikoff on with just enough to get the story publicity, but saving for themselves the blockbuster details and a chance to make a profitable book.
So Tripp and agent Goldberg conspired to have Tripp record her phone calls with her “friend” Monica Lewinski and that’s how these famous double-crosser recordings were born. They were a set up for Linda Tripp’s dirty book deal.
Rare was the American in 1998 who wasn’t familiar with an entire series of audio recording of Monica Lewinski spilling her guts to her consoling friend Linda Tripp. The nation was disgusted with Linda Tripp. She was Miss Backstabber 1998. And she made Queen Victoria look like a fox.
The trip trap expanded to include conspiring to get Lewinski to begin demanding a job from the White House as the price to get rid of her. Monica took the bait and the White House took the bait from Monica. Clinton was soon scrambling to get Monica a hand-out position, even sending Bill Richardson to interview her for a job at the Watergate Apartment complex where they both lived. She went on a job interview at her apartment. The job came to her as supplicant!
On January 7 of 1999 the pot of cheater-stew finally came to a boil and the second impeachment trial of a President of the United States opened in Washington.
On January 12, 1999 Clinton settled the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit by paying her $850,000. Not a bad paycheck for trailer-trash that invented the entire story with the help of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
On January 19, in the middle of his trial, Clinton gave his State of the Union speech, an understandably subdued talk, lacking some of the vigorous pride for the Democrat side and criticism of the other side that marks most of these events.
In his 7,000 page auto-biography Clinton in his own Slick Willie style mixes attacks on his enemies with qualified apologies for his conduct, conveniently leaving out key parts of stories. For example, he says that he and Monica Lewinski “talked on the phone” occasionally in the ten months but she was no longer visiting the White House, but they were still “friends.” What he omitted was that he had his pants down while they chatted on the phone. She testified in a court of law that the two of them had “phone sex.” These two were taking the phone company commercials at their word when the ads encouraged their customers to, “reach out and touch someone.” Even if it’s only yourself.
Bill's book mentions Hillary’s famous remark on the TODAY show that the charges against her husband were the work of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and confirms her point of view in the same paragraph with, “she was right about the nature of our opposition.”
In the next paragraph we read,
“I was in a legal and political struggle with forces who had abused the criminal and civil laws and severely damaged innocent people in their attempt to destroy my presidency and cripple my ability to serve.”
Even Nixon would laugh in his grave at that one.
In the next paragraph he admits to have committed some misconduct but on the other hand, “I didn’t want to compound the error by letting the reactionaries prevail.”
Reactionaries, eh?
“Reactionaries” is a weasel word adopted by the left around 1900 that is used to discredit anyone who disagrees with any leftist point of view. All any leftist has to do is throw in the word “reactionary” and 30,000 pages of argument and research is discredited. End of story. This is “reactionary” that is “reactionary”. He is a “reactionary” they are “reactionaries.” Case closed. A word trumps all.
What does this word mean anyway? One who reacts to something and causes an even more angry reaction, causing the immature opponent to invoke the word. It is a vague and inscrutable word that really can be invoked by anyone at any time for any purpose, since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If a parent scolds a teen-ager for coming home late, the parent can be accused of being a “reactionary”. If a soccer fan cheers for a goal, they too can be called a “reactionary.” It is “reactionary” to stop at a red light. If a Democrat criticizes a speech by a Republican the Republican can just as easily call the Democrat a “reactionary.” It is always a word used by those who can’t think of a legitimate irrefutable point when they are losing an argument. The lefties now think they own the word and use it freely to bail themselves out of debates at every level. In this case it is adopted to protect a personal failure. Author Clinton is using left versus right as a clever smoke-screen to protect the real issues which are: proper presidential behavior versus improper presidential behavior; legal as opposed to illegal actions; lying to a grand jury as opposed to being truthful to a grand jury.
One thing we know for sure. The US Supreme Court was “reactionary” when on September 31, 2001 it permanently disbarred Lawyer Clinton from ever hearing a case before it again. The top legal authority in the USA was reacting to his untruthfulness before a grand jury. The Arkansas Supreme Court was also reactionary when in April of 2002 it suspended his license to practice law in that state for five years and levied a $25,000 fine against Bill for the same offense (this as a settlement after the ASSC had sued him in quest of permanent disbarment!)
The American people were ‘reactionary’ when they did not give Al Gore enough votes to carry the electoral college in the 2000 election. If Clinton had not been such a Casanova, Gore could have easily defeated the highly imperfect W. Bush. But Clinton's coattails had stains. This Democrat had been impeached and only the left and his personal fans still loved him. The Clinton administration legacy did nothing to swing the critical swing vote. Nothing. Democratic Clinton apologists should consider that fact. Your guy decimated your party, whether you want to admit it or not. You guys all hate W Bush so much. You have your own guy's loose fly to thank for putting W. in and for the War in Iraq which never would have happened in a Gore Administration. Gore would have won if not for Billy's bimbo blunders.
Clinton’s idea that his enemies are no good reactionaries is especially naïve coming from such a supposedly seasoned politician. Politics is a controlled and civilized form of war. Does he not know that the opposition party has a duty to try and get him? If you can’t stand the heat why did you campaign to get into the kitchen? Does he expect the Republicans and the conservatives to support him and praise him? Politics is a dirty game and one should expect nothing less from both sides from beginning to end. The idea that he is so offended that his enemies are attacking him is like getting onto a football field and being indignant because the other team had the audacity to show up and start hitting. The nerve of those people in the opposition to try and get him and jump on his every failure in an attempt to bring him down! The Democrats used every trick in the book to try and bring down President George W. Bush and good for them. That’s their job. And it’s the job of conservatives to circle the wagons and defend W. Clinton wants a free ride and thinks it somehow immoral for the opposition party to live up to the name.
So to some degree Hillary was right. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy. There is also a vast left-wing conspiracy. Both conspiracies are always at work, and the swing voters are up for grabs in the middle of the casualty riddled battlefield. Add the two up and you get politics as usual.
George Washington had enemies. So did Mohammed and Martin Luther and Sun Yet Sen. Abraham Lincoln had one or two. What makes you so special that you aren’t supposed to have any, especially with the laundry list of scandals in your administration from Travelgate to the Bimbofest? Bill Clinton and his wife are competitive people and would never have entered politics if it weren’t for the love of battle. They thrive and breathe for the fights with their enemies. The fight is what makes them rise in the game, not the loving spirit that consumes them when they give a speech to a nursing home. I look up to any Senator or President that I oppose. I salute their competitive spirit and prefer them any day to dullards without a zest for a good scrap. If Bill and Hillary were all benevolence they would have taken up a career with the Red Cross or fed lepers in Bangladesh for UNICEF.
During the trial a t-shirt there was for sale that read, “GORE IN 99.” It was made by Republicans. You might have to think that one over.
THE VERDICT
On February 12, 1999 Bill Clinton was acquitted on two counts of impeachable offenses. The first charge was perjury and he was off the hook by a score of 55 for acquittal and 45 for conviction. On the second count, obstruction of justice it was a 50-50 tie. 67 out of 100 would be required for conviction, a 2/3rds majority. If a simple majority had been required (as in some civil trials) he would have survived the ordeal by exactly one vote.
Later Clinton said he was not ashamed that he had been impeached and that it was all part of a shameful effort by his enemies to get him.
On the other hand it must be conceded that decision to proceed with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton, knowing they would lose, may have backfired on the Republicans in an historical sense.
At the time it was satisfying to get the bad guy up for trial and it was a fine humiliation. But during the debate on whether to impeach, the Democrats had begged and argued angrily that the best answer to Clinton’s misdeeds was a resolution for censure. The Democrats clearly would have overwhelmingly supported such a censure resolution. That means that instead of the Democrats going down in history as successfully defending President Clinton, as they did, a censure resolution would have instead left a legacy of his own Democratic Party uniting with the opposition in resolutely condemning him.
So now the Clinton Impeachment looks to history like an unsuccessful witch-hunt by vindictive Republicans, whereas with censure (and the Democrats would have voted 98% yes on censure) could have looked like a successful condemnation by both parties. The censure of Andrew Jackson did not have this kind of broad support of all the political parties. The impeachment of Andy Johnson in 1868 did not have the full support of both parties. A censure of President Clinton would have been overwhelmingly supported by both parties, a chastisement of the chief executive unparalleled in US history.
AN ANALYSIS OF THE BARBARA WALTERS/MONY INTERVIEW
Think of a few of the most famous names in American History; Abe Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Al Capone, John Brown, Charles Lindbergh, OJ Simpson, Neil Armstrong, Boss Tweed, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Babe Ruth, George Patton, Monica Lewinski, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison.
What is wrong with this list? How in the hell did Monica Lewinski get on this list? Is this an injustice to history or what? Yes it is. A young selfish horny valley-girl ditz out for only herself got on her hands and knees and performed oral sex on the President many times in a secret liaison inside the White House, and on taxpayer time. When they get discovered she becomes one of the top ten most famous people in the country. Probably, for six months Monica Lewinski was the second most famous person in the country after the man she serviced. She made Bono from U-2 seem like a nobody.
In the middle of all the Mony-mania ABC announced that it was going to air an interview with the great Monica Lewinski. Wow! This is big! “One Network Only!”, they promoted it proudly.
It was to be hosted by none other than Barbara Walters the number one interviewer in the country. “Monica speaks!” the tabloids barked in anticipation. Now that she had been granted immunity from prosecution she was willing to talk.
Her name had been in the headlines for months but no one knew what she was really like. We had seen a few pictures but no one had heard her speak. Now we could at least get a reading on who she really was. “Speak so that I may see thee,” a philosopher once said. Not only that, ML was refusing to be paid for the interview. She only wanted to tell her side of the story.
The ratings for this show were clearly going to rival that of the Kennedy speech during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and any given Super Bowl. ABC was going to had a lock on the country’s televisions that night. I had to work that night but a friend of mine taped it and lent me the copy. I have since watched it about 8 times and have saved many audio clips that I play in my car. I know the interview as well as anyone and can quote much of it verbatim. It is a very important interview in assessing the entire Clinton scandal and its political import.
By and large, the public, both Democrat and Republican, saw Lewinski as the naïve victim of Clinton the cad predator. I never heard a single word of real anger expressed against her in public media or in my private conversations. Clinton was the bad guy and she was just taken for a ride by this experienced Casanova. Overall I thinks its a fair assessment, but Lewinski was 22, not 12. She bears plenty of responsibility for everything that happened.
The affair began in ernest when one day in the Oval Office, without being prompted she lifted her skirt to show Clinton her new panties. An ugly girl can seduce a man doing that, and Monica was pretty. It also makes her, by some standards, a slut. Not in her mind, not in the mind of Beverly Hills where she grew up. In West Hollywood its 'Hey, you meet a famous rock star or president, you make a move, he goes for it, hey, what young woman wouldn't do that?' Then you got millions of conservative and religious women all over the country who are thinking, 'What kind of girl would do that?' Neither group can even understand the other's point of view. But it certainly was her choice and she made the aggressive move. Of course he facilitated it by having her there in private in the first place. I'd say they were equally bad. Maybe it's a big sexist as in male-bashing that he takes a beating of criticism for what happened and she doesn't. She wasn't his 12 year old neice.
But what is most striking about the interview is that after the country was rocked and sent off its axis by this needless scandal she still had not opened her eyes about the man. She still thought that her affair with him (she goes down on him – and he goes back to work) was a deep meaningful affair of the heart. What is most incredible is that throughout the interview she is pleading to the country to try to understand how much pain she went through when the president broke her heart!
Amazing!
Astonishing!
Spectacular stupidity defying the scale of super-ditz naiveté. It was bad enough that she was that naïve in the first place. But to maintain that kind of blind dunce-brain after it all becomes a national scandal and all of Clinton’s past sexual transgressions are aired in the media is worthy of an Olympic pin-head gold medal.
At several points I had to play the tape back and ask myself. ‘did I really hear what I think I just heard?’ – Is she really asking America to say poor Monica because Clinton didn’t call her back when he promised he would? Is she really still angry and wants us to sympathize with her because
“one minute he says ‘I care so much about you’ and the next minute he is ignoring me completely”
After all of this scandal has shaken up the government and has cost the taxpayers millions, handcuffing his ability to run foreign policy at full capacity, is she really sitting there on national television focusing completely on his romantic betrayal of her? She doesn't even have the decency one time to feel a little shame that she is violating his marriage. Not even once. Not even for a half a second. It never occurs to her that her “romance” is below average in sweetness because its a cheat.
This next one's called, “Hurt your baby”
Imagine that your 22 year old daughter with two kids comes bursting into your home in tears. “What’s the matter pal?” – She falls on the sofa crying. “He’s left me for another woman! He won’t even say where he’s gone to. He’s left the country! I’m not even going to get alimony!.”
Now at that point you hug her and the two of you cry together. You want to buy a shotgun and try to find this guy you thought only yesterday was a fine son-in-law.
That is exactly the sort of sympathy that Monica Lewinsky was pleading to the public for in the Barbara Walters interview in the hurt your baby segment.
When Clinton broke up with her she went crying to her father about it. Like he's supposed to be mad at President Clinton for no longer sending her roses after oral. She actually had this big dramatic slow spoken segment where she hammed it up and talk about how Clinton had broken her heart after misleading her. Then she looks for sympathy because he has too much power for her father to go beat him up!
I'm not kidding you. She actually said in this context that, “My father can't exactly go beat the guy up. It's pretty tough when the man who hurt your baby is the President of the United States.”
The opening scene in the Godfather has a man coming to the mob boss for justice because some guy had put his daughter in a wheelchair. Monica is invoking this mentality on her broken heart in an oral sex cheaters relationship with an old man that only ended because he moved on to someone else and they almost got caught. It's insane to think you're father should go beat any guy up just for breaking up with her. If he leaves her with 8 kids to care for and flees to Australia or if he hurts her physically, that's another story. But she thinks her father more or less had the instinct to go beat up Bill Clinton because he broke off her oral sex service relationship. I challenge anyone to re-listen to that section of the interview and say I heard her wrong.
This says a lot to me about her mind.
TEAR UP
Monica went on and on about how Clinton one day said that he really cared for her and might some day leave his wife. This guy could play Cassanova with all the trimmings. She told him once that she thought she was just being used, and at that point,
“He said, 'How can you even think a thing like that?” And he started to tear up.”
Tear up! Wow, this guy's GOOD! If only he had coached me when I was in high school. You get regular oral from a chubby cute bimbo on command in a side room in the middle of your work day, and when she says she feels used you actually manage to 'tear up.' Holy moly! I bow to the master!
I have an imaginary scene of Hillary screaming at Bill for a day and a half after the interview. Then, in a moment of truce they go up to the White House roof for a glass of wine, and a peace pipe. Hillary looks out at the warm Washington skyline and suddenly busts out laughing. She stops then starts again. Then again, and more laughing.
“What are you laughing about?” asks Bill who's uncomfortable but is at least happy that Hillary isn't yelling at him.
“Oh nothing.” Then she laughs some more.
“Come on, what are you laughing at?” He's not smiling now because he knows its something at his expense, and who could blame her and he has to take it as part of his punishment.
“Nothing!” Baaa ha ha ha ha!”
“Come on, tell me!”
She looks at him with a wry smile and says “You teared up? Baaaw ha ha ha! You're an insufferable scum but I gotta admit! You are good !”
“C'mon Hil lay off.” But now Bill is trying not to laugh too.
“You teared up? Haa haa ha! And she fell for it? Haaa haa ha! And after all this she still doesn't get it? Oh, that is rich! Haa ha ha ha!”
Bill can't hold it in any longer. He bursts out laughing too. The two of them laugh all the way back to the bedroom, and the only real fool in all of this is Monica Lewinski.
FUNKY CONNIE HAMZY
For the record, Flowers, Corbin, Lewinsky, Willy and Brodderick were almost preceded in the media by the first official POB (Pigeon of Bill) Connie Hamzy.
Connie Ham was an 80’s groupie girl who had kept a diary of her sexcapades. In 1991 Penthouse was going to publish it. the adult magazine that would later publish (January 1992) the Jennifer Flowers-Bill Clinton story. The Penthouse scribe spotted an entry in Hamzy’s sex diary about a pool encounter with Governor Clinton. An Arkansas State trooper approached Hamzy at the pool and asked her is she wanted to meet the Governor of Arkansas. Connie was a girl who could not say no to celebrities and the two frisky hippies (one disguised as a politician) began a frantic search to find an empty hut. But alas there was no cabana for his banana and the steamy quickie never happened.
But the story made for a great read and was close to printing when the Clinton liars brigade swung into battle. Clinton told primo handler Stephanopulos that Connie had come onto him by dropping her bikini top (apparently no one else was at the pool to see this, but the two of them at the same time couldn’t find any privacy to have the actual sexual acts).
Hillary Clinton weighed in, “we have to destroy her story.” Stephanopulos was a witness to this statement.
Then two of Clinton’s professional liars, including Arky aide Michael Gaines signed affidavits swearing that they were with Bill the entire day and that the story had to have been invented. Diaries lie, they said, and Hamzy's story was hazy. The story was never printed. The White House later made sure Michael was gainfully employed as chairman of the U.S. Board of paroles.
Throughout it all the left kept calling Paula Jones “White trash.” Why the double-standard on racial prejudice and discrimination? If Paula Jones had been black would 80 million liberals have dismissed her allegations as worthless because she was “black trash?” Would the liberals applaud and support this explanation for the whole situation, as they did with the white trash explanation? No one would have dared to take that angle. Black Paula Jones would have had a national army of lawyers fighting for her. The NAACP and all the famous black leaders would have stood behind her at the microphone. What if Maxine Watters alleged that Clinton had whipped it out in her face against her will. Would Bill Clinton have finished his term?
With all the focus on Lewdwinski the morally depraved naïve bimbo, liberals tend to forget the Jones case. What Clinton did to Jones was not just immoral it was a criminal form of sexual assault and indecent exposure.
The comedians of America “criticized” Clinton in their jokes, but it was always with a tinge of junior high school ‘you devil you’ approval. They made playful fun about what a sex fiend he is, or focused on his supposed “bad taste’ in women. Never jokes about the criminal nature of his conduct. Never about the disservice to the country. They were using jokes to playfully defuse the situation and soften things up, a gentle joke and sketch to help the cause.
If a Republican President had done the same thing, the criminal assault part would have been front and center and they'd all yell like outraged PTA members about his morals.
Case in point is “satirist” Al Franken’s explanation of why the mainstream media is not liberally biased He cites Clinton’s sex scandals as proof,
To believe there is a liberal political bias in the mainstream
media, you’d have to be either not be paying attention or
just be very susceptible to repetition. …
Anyone notice the mainstream media’s coverage of Clinton?
For eighteen months, it was all Monica, all the time. There
were just a few news organizations that did not succumb to
this temptation, and I like to cite them whenever I can:
Sailing Magazine, American Grocer Monthly, Juggs, and
Big Butt (which is ironic, because I think Big Butt had a
story.)
Franken doesn’t use his irreverent humor to address Clinton’s alleged perjury and indecent exposure in the Jones case, the lies to the American people in the Lewinski case, or the criminal assault alleged in the Broderick or Willy case. The sworn statements of the Arkansas state troopers don’t get the pleasure of his company either. The chosen target for Franken’s funnybone wrath is Lewinski’s rear end. The Leno syndrome again, make cute jokes about the bimbos, and rib Bill a little about what an incorrigible lady-hound he is, thus defusing the serious issues of misuse of office and overt criminal sexual assault.
And so what if the media happened to give a lot of coverage to the Lewinski scandal? Is that proof that the media is not liberal biased? The issue is not whether or not there was a lot of coverage, but whether the coverage was biased. Yes Al, it was indeed ‘all Monica all the time.’ So? And if Franken’s sister claimed she had been sexually harassed by President Clinton, it probably wouldn’t have been quite as funny to Al.
This citation is the typical left-wing satirist technique of ducking behind humor when the argument is weak, and completely discarding humor when making what is perceived to be a strong argument.
The only thing more revolting than what he did was the way all the liberals defended him. They were red in the face, choking with emotion saying things like, “what he does with his _____ is his business!” I know, I saw it on TV, read it in print, and it was said to me often. “What he does with his ----- is his business!.” All of a sudden the left lost its famous sensitivity about sexual harassment.
MOVEON.ORG
It still is in business today big time. Moveon.org was founded as an organization dedicated to defending Bill Clinton during his alleged persecution over a mere sexual affair. It was supposed to mean, “It's time for this country to move on to more important things.”
So when it was making headlines in the mid 0's calling Bush a war criminal in the Iraq war, and all that good stuff, the Moveon title didn't make any sense. But it had grown into such an effective Republican-bashing monster machine, that it continued on and still does. It was like Nightline, which started only because of the Iran Hostage Crisis back in 1979 and stayed on after it was settled and is still on at this writing in 2012.
Zillionaire George Soros had much to do with the founding of Moveon.org.
Part of their rationale for spending (meaning Soros and a few junior partners) large sums was that the Republicans were already doing as much and worse with their so-called “Arkansas Project.”
Richard Scaife had spent 2 million dollars to set up a private investigative organization looking for anything they could use against Bill Clinton to either detract from his reputation, or get him out of office, or maybe, with a little luck, even into jail!
The Bush-haters and the Clintons all cite this Scaife guy as an evil monster. They justify all their hatred and attacks on Bush by pointing to Scaife and the Arkie Project as the ones who started the brawl.
All the right-wing talk show nuts hate Soros and say he's an extreme international socialist. All I know is that I really like his writing skills. It's hard for me to get too mad at someone that writes so well, unlike, say, an Al Franken.
A KEN STARR IS BORN
The man the pop-left hated the most was Ken Starr. He was the special investigator into Whitewater Appropriations who expanded the scope of that inquiry to include Clinton's life of lust.
The Clinton supporters hated Ken Starr so much that for a couple of months they actually forgot to hate Reagan and Bush. They got red in the face when Ken Starr's name came up. It was the only stretch when I didn't hear the usual rips of former presidents Reagan and Bush and how stupid they were.
Ken Starr began the investigation as a lifelong registered Democrat. President Clinton approved his appointment as Clinton investigator.
When the Starr Report was released is was a national sensation. It contained all the juicy details, all mapped out for the first time. It was not a quick read. I got a full copy from a daily newspaper insert the day it came out, but after that you had to buy it as a book. For days the newscasters were discussing it while solemnly warning listeners about the bawdy details in them. CNN's Candy Crowley warned that
“Some of these details may be a little graphic. You might want to ask the young children to leave the room.”
It was indeed very graphic. Everyone ate it up while pretending to be offended. I really thought I would study it, but, like Nicholas Nickleby, I have yet find the time for the Starr Report as a three-day read. The Memoirs of Field Marshall Kesselring, to name one, is ahead of The Starr Report on the reading list.
I have to say that I don't know if Starr was or was not out ot get the Clintons, but it was fascinating to see the Clinton supporters hating him like no one has ever hated anyone before. Whoopie Goldberg told a cheering Bel Air audience that,
“I'd like to put Ken Starr in a headlock and re-arrange his ugly face!”
All I know is, if they were wrong, and Ken Starr is not an unspeakably bad human being out to get the Clintons for a great evil right-wing Republican machine, then these Starr-haters should be ashamed of themselves. They want to kill the messenger. To use Hillary’s well known term, “we must destroy that story.”
The Starr Report was the dominant topic of political and comedy talk shows for at least a month.
LIVINGSTON OUT OF CONGRESS, I PRESUME
In late 1998 the heir apparent to the job of Speaker of the House was Bob Livingston. But he was forced to resign as an indirect result of the Clinton sexcapades.
Like everyone, publisher Larry Flint of Hustler magazine hated Republicans. He believed that Ken Starr was like one of the judges in the 1692 Salem Witch Hunt. He thought that Starr wasn't out for the truth, just for political capital. He also thought they all were a no good bunch of hypocrites because Republicans had just as many skeletons in their closet as Bill Clinton.
So Captain Flint offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could produce scandalous evidence leading to the downfall of a prominent Republican. It took a few weeks, and there weren't as many hits as expected, but one source came through and got the dough. They got the goods on Bob Livingston and when he knew that an article was coming out proving it, he had to jump the gun for damage control.
Republican Bob Livingston stood on the House Floor and made a not the usual speech about the Clinton scandals and how the President should resign for what he has done. Livingston was getting some scattered boos from the Dems. Bob then said that he would not ask the President to do anything that he would not do in a similar situation. Congressman Livingston said that he was guilty of an extramarital affair and announced his resignation right then and there and walked off the podium!
I happened to be watching CNN that day. I can't describe the sound of the reaction in the audience. It was as unique as the moment called for it to be. It was something.
Turned out Livingston did not formally leave office until May of 1999 but he did resign and never made Speaker. Hustler changed history. Livingston was ‘out like Flint.’
Clinton was often asked if he would ever consider resigning. He always paused and gave a dramatic “Never ever.” Way to think of the country first. No matter how it could hurt the country you are so power hungry you would “Never Ever” resign. Thanks a lot, Mr. Selfish. Of course he was probably just saying it to help win the battle at the moment. In any case, you know your Presidency in trouble when the only power standing tall and scoring any points for you is Hustler.
LATE-TERM FOREIGN POLICY
EGYPT AIR 990 - HORROR ON HALLOWEEN
On October 31 1999 a Boeing 767 of the Egypt Airlines crashed into the Atlantic about 60 miles south of Nantucket. Flight 990 had left New York bound for Cairo. As usual, everyone on board was killed (there shouldn’t even a be a term called ‘fear of flying’ - it should be called ‘thinking logically while flying.’)
In the wake of the tragedy there was a lot of publicity about the possibility that the crash was an act of terrorist suicide by the Arab pilot. CBS news reported shortly thereafter that the pilot may have been arguing with his co-pilot, and that the pilot’s last words were,
“I have made my decision. I place my fate in God’s hands.”
A closer examination of the exact transcripts later revealed that the guy was terrified that he was about to die and he kept answering all his instructions from Air Traffic control with the chant of,
“I trust in God.”
The pilot was a rich man with a happy family and no known links to terrorist Islamic groups but a lot of Americans believed the story that it was a suicide. I certainly bought it for a while. The more the story was investigated however, the more it seems like the crash of Egypt 990 was not an act of religious hatred, but the reaction to it may have been.
THE RUSSIANS
STROBE LIGHT
Thanks to the victory of the free nations in the Cold War under Reagan and the Senior Bush, Clinton was able to put in a typical liberal slashing of the defense budget while paradoxically seeing the United States grow stronger in the world compared to all the competition. When the Soviet Union imploded the USA became the only superpower by default. But it was mostly the result of Republican presidencies.
But if the Soviet Union had not imploded and the nations of Eastern Europe had not been granted independence, the Democrats would no doubt have mocked the Cold Warriors as paranoid and anti-progressive and would have slashed the defense budget anyway. Clinton might have to some degree returned the USA to appeasement in Carter style. But since the traditional enemy had essentially disarmed, the Clinton administrations were able to give the left was it always wants more than anything else, more than world peace itself, the reduction in status, power and capability of the US Military establishment. Clinton may have inherited some of the liabilities of Republican deficit spending but he also rode the coattails of Republican Cold War battle scars which he never supported in his personal life or in his political.
The head of Russian analysis in the Clinton White House was his college roommate at Oxford, Strobe Talbott. I read one-third of three of his books in the 1980’s and I didn’t like them, though I would still like to finish them. Talbott 1980’s books were well written Oxfordian versions of the Blame American First movement the Cold War history. Could you possibly be more Russophile?
Talbott thought that the Soviet Union was not the bad guy. Then from 89-91 Communism collapsed and for three years the whole world cheered and wept as the Russians admitted that they had been the bad guys and wanted to start fresh.
“Communism was a tragedy for our country. It is too bad that it this failed experiment couldn’t have been tried out in some smaller country,” said Boris Yeltsin as a press conference in an emotional moment of great historical significance (he said it on ABC as he sat next to Gorby).
Ok, now that the Cold War is over, let’s name a guy who has just been proven wrong on everything to run things in that field. Let’s name Strobe. I spit out my coffee when I read how high up Strobe was heading, worried for our country that a Blame American First lefty Russophile was being named special advisor to the President on Russian Affairs and then assistant Secretary of State. I just hoped to God that we survived this guy.
Talbott is a Russia scholar of major proportions. His books are rich. He is a good readable writer, but it’s hard for me to make it through them because I disagree with just about everything he writes.
For example, he is forever citing Russian fear of encirclement and its geographic vulnerability to invasion, as though a hundred other nations could not cite similar fears and use it to justify aggression. Russia's neighbors from Turkey to China could express the same fear in reverse. Russia claiming to be the traditional victim of outside aggressors is the biggest joke in the world. But Russia can always count on western fools like Strobe to back up this propaganda.
It takes forever to read ten pages of the Strobester because I write out the full rebuttal with a fine-point top-quality pen. Some pages have almost as many words in the margins as on the page.
Talbott was fascinated with Russia from the time he was a liberal boy. Strobe is not a mean man, nor a cheap shop artist, nor a hotheaded pugilist like Jimmy Carville. But Talbott is a consistent apologist for his favorite country and he obviously never read Anatoly Golitsyn. Strobe Talbott had a preponderant influence on Clinton in Russian affairs. Talbott may have directed U.S. post-Cold war foreign policy in the Russian arena even more than President Clinton did. He had a Kissinger-like importance, but Talbot, unlike “Special K,” is not a household name. Bill and Strobe were close like FDR and Hopkins. They had chased babes together in 1968 in London.
President Clinton had 18 person-to-person summit meetings with Russian ‘President’ Boris Yeltsin. Talbott likes to point out that this equaled more than several of the previous US-Soviet summits combined, as if that fact is proof of the excellence of the administration and its State Department advisors. It’s a dubious brag because of course Clinton had more meetings since the Cold War was over and Russia wanted to join the (economic) family of nations. Its easy to set a new record for meetings with friends after other Presidents had to arrange summits with enemies.
I wish I could agree with Talbott on more things because he’s a good writer, scholar and person. And he’s obviously knowledgeable about Russia. But he may have actually been too strong on the subject for the job. Diplomats who become too fond of their assigned countries are often recalled. It is a custom of diplomacy. Rotation is sometimes mandatory because the US Ambassador to Ecuador grows too Ecuadorian and has to be recalled. When Charlie changes his own first name to Hector, and then names his newborn son Lopez, it’s time for Charlie to come home from Quito. Boris Talbott would not have been my first choice to run the Russian Bureau of the State Department. He put a savage beating on Ronald Reagan in many of his books.
The end result of overall US-Russian relations under the Clinton administration is that the United States gave them a lot of money, didn’t have a war with them, and the only near confrontation in the Balkans at a bridge was handled smoothly by both sides, although that one did look dangerous for a couple of days. Strobe Light didn’t do a bad job after all.
BLACK NINJA’S
Clinton was always trying to find ways to strike at al Qaeda. When you consider the way in which Osama was actually captured, it is interesting to read this testimony from Clinton at the 911 hearings. He says he told General Shelton,
“You know Hugh, it would scare the hell out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.”
That’s just about how it went down in February 2011 when the Ninja Seals got him.
The problem for Clinton and his JCS chief was which helicopters to use and how to use them. There was the MH-6, a great bird, but that had no range. There was the UH-60. There was the Pave Low MH-53 but that had short range too.
THE CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
On May 7 1999 NATO jet fighters (meaning mostly US) struck the Chinese embassy with a couple of deadly missiles killing three Chinese citizens. The US tried to apologize for the incident explaining that the fault was with outdated maps that had been programmed into the computers. China was outraged and anti-US protests erupted in Shanghai and Beijing. One US consulate was set on fire. The US Embassy in another Chinese city was surrounded by an angry mob of students reminiscent of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.
In terms of international relations I would have to say that it is illogical to think the United States would do that on purpose and deliberately damage US-Chinese relations. Are US pilots really going to get and then obey orders to miss real military targets one purpose and hit the Chinese Embassy? What could the United States gain from this?
There’s about 70 reasons why the USA wouldn’t do that on purpose. Here’s reason #48 - In real life the Pentagon isn’t going to risk one of the pilots going to the press one day and saying what he had been ordered to do. The Chinese had been watching too many (pirated) American action movies where the chain of evil goes right up to the Pentagon guy who is ordering mass assassinations in ways Sadaam would never dream of, and for no reason at all except the love of evil. That’s Peking-Hollywood propaganda. US Leftywood also made this charge, that it was delibrate. The left critics can’t, however, unite on why the US and NATO did this bad thing. Some say it was because the embassy was being used to relay military information by radio to the enemy, while others say it was because the US military thought that Serbian villain Slobodan Milosovich was in the building and the strike was a virtual assassination attempt. It would be easier to buy their argument if they could agree on it.
One Chinese writer in a 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs says that the US bombed the Chinese Embassy as a warning to the Chinese to always be aware of the strength and fearlessness of US military power. The most advanced source provides the most retarded view.
ECONOMY
The stock market gained seven consecutive years in Clinton’s time including a three year stretch when the stock market overall gained 20-30%, the greatest bull market in history. In 1997 no less than 60 million individual Americans made money on the stock market.
All that would change in the late 0's.
The Clinton haters won’t give him his due on how he handled the economy. I didn’t vote for him twice and I’d give him a B+ on the economy and I’m probably being stingy. Some of the economic gains were part of a wheel that was already turning under Bush the First, but overall it’s hard to argue that Clinton didn’t fulfill his campaign promise to focus on the economy, reduce the federal deficit, and balance the budget.
W Bush could have managed to continue the positive economic ride, but after he went to war in 03, the federal money picture went out the window.
IRAQ OVERVIEW
The confrontation between Clinton and the UN on one side and Sadaam Hussein on the other over weapons inspections was in the news on a near daily basis during the Clinton years. More and more Sadaam defied the UN weapons inspectors and began throwing them out without a good-bye. Clinton warned Iraq that America was no longer a paper tiger like the days before Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Even though he was a Democrat even he would use our military power if you pushed him far enough and if he did, it wouldn’t be pretty. Sadaam laughed him off.
IRAQ LIBERATION ACT
Most of the hatred directed against W Bush in his two terms was about the immoral illegal vicious uncalled for Republican generated insane war in Iraq of 2003. W gets blamed for the whole thing most of the time. If not him alone, his neocon Vulcans like Wolfi, Condi, DC, Rummie and Richard Perle (who had no nickname) are the co villains.
But Clinton was ready to go to war with Iraq “any day now” for eight years. Bill Clinton was on a hair trigger for eight years over Iraq. If Clinton and Albright had done the same war, it would not have generated one third the opposition from the left. There would have been some angry noise, to be sure, but one third is, if anything, a conservative estimate of the double-standard that would have applied in reaction.
The Iraq Liberation Act was hashed over for much of 1998 and was finally enacted into law by Congress on Halloween. It stated that the goal of the United States was no longer merely containing and monitoring Iraq. The new goal as explicitly stated in the ILA was for “Regime Change” in Iraq. In other words, Sadaam must go! Clinton signed on and let the next guy do something about it.
The document is long and complex, as usual for Congressional acts. It lists all the crimes of Sadaam going back to the 1980's. It lists many options on how the USA can assist Iraqi organizations that were hoping to overthrow Sadaam.
The ILA closes significantly with an article that makes it clear that this is not an authorization for the United States to use its own armed forces in Iraq to accomplish this goal.
SADAAM'S STAND
Sadaam played his hand on November 2 1998 when he made it official. He would no longer co-operate with UN weapons inspectors. Hussein also demanded that the sanctions against Iraq be lifted.
CLINTON TIMING BOMBS
On December 16, 1998, on the even of the Congressional Impeachment Hearings, the United States with the assistance of steadfast ally Great Britain launched a sustained series of missiles strikes against key military and industrial targets inside Iraq. The missiles did a lot of damage but in the aftermath didn’t really change Sadaam’s defiance of the weapons’ inspectors.
Clinton did not commit ground forces in Iraq but he certainly threatened to.
Because of the coincidental timing of the Impeachment Hearings, there was a galaxy of critics saying that Clinton was doing this as a way to distract the country from the Impeachment Hearings, or, even better, postpone the Impeachment Hearings entirely. They called it a perfect case of the ‘Wag the Dog’ syndrome. ‘Wag’ was a movie starring Dustin Hoffman in which the president starts up an international crisis to boost up his plummeting ratings with the American public.
I was shocked at how many people said this and seemed to believe it. I heard Congresspersons say it openly. Most of the criticism came from Republicans and conservatives, but not all. The average non-political person jumped in on this one. Disc-jockeys who voted twice for Clinton were saying it. Famous columnists were saying it. Less famous socialist columnists were screaming it.
I never thought that for a second.
I think that deep down, Clinton will always be a hippie who doesn’t really love the flag. But I would never suspect that he doesn’t love God. He is a religious guy and a true believer and I don’t think for a second that he would ever send missiles into cities that would almost certainly maim and kill innocent civilian women and children, just for political points. I just think it’s insane for anyone to think that. The timing of the Impeachment was just a coincidence, pure and simple.
I was so saddened by the quality of people that were stupid enough to say this. I expect to hear this from dunderheads at a bus stop but the talent that said this point-blank was stunning. Did they really think that Secretary of Defense Cohen, a dedicated Republican, would support this scheme, or that the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces wouldn’t know better if this were just a ruse to distract the public from a sensational trial? Would Great Britain commit the lives of it’s men to save Bill Clinton from an impeachment hearing? Would they also be so base-brained as to not smell a rat if they indeed were being used for a personal political agenda?
I watched Clinton’s press conferences during Desert Fox and his sincerity moved me. I felt bad for the guy. He felt terrible about making people die.
The obvious criticism is that Clinton didn’t do enough, that his solution to Iraq was only half-baked. There are a few books that make this assertion. These revisionists were probably pretty happy about Desert Fox at the time, but 9 years later they question Clinton’s virility on Iraq since they now have the conquest of Iraq by George Bush to compare it to.
I say that Desert Fox was fairly tough stuff coming from a Democrat. The U.S. could have had a Carter or a Denis Kucinich in there, two men who probably would have not supported a plan such as Fox.
Also, Clinton did not have the specter of 911 to motivate him to go much farther. Two different playing fields entirely. Without 911, I doubt that W would have gone much farther than Desert Fox parameters.
Overall I think Clinton gets a C plus on Iraq.
I have to give him a B minus on foreign policy and I hate to do it because I'm the opposition, plus he gave gigantically important national security jobs to college roommate Strobe Talbott. Since when does buying the keg constitute a qualification to advise on the nuclear missiles?
Clinton continued a policy of a locked and loaded US military begun by Reagan with the 1986 attack on Libya. Clinton held the line for the revived American military, even if it didn’t digest well in the belly of an ex-hippie.
Many critics say that Clinton let the quality of our Armed Forces deteriorate. If that is true then I denounce him for it, but don’t know if it’s true. I do think that President Clinton used U.S. military strength just enough to let the world know that the era of the US paper tiger had not returned. And that was good enough for me.
The bad side of Desert Fox is that Sadaam got away with his policy of defiance. The four days of missile strikes did not change the fact that Sadaam had gotten away with it. It's like a guy stole your car so you punched him in the mouth. But the next day he's still driving your car and you don't press charges. That was Desert Fox. Sadaam could handle bombing with no invasion. Clinton wasn't playing paper tiger, just the tiger that makes one swipe of his claw and draws some blood but then walks away.
THE ATTACK ON THE USS COLE
In October of 2000 a terrorist attack hit the United States Navy in the Middle East. The USS Cole was sitting at the dock in Yemen when an Islamic terrorist dinghy loaded with explosives crashed into the hull with a suicide attack. 17 American sailors died.
President Clinton in his 15,000 page biography My Endless Life devotes only one and a half paragraphs to the attack on the Cole. His childhood memories are elaborately described in page after boring page. But foreign affairs get short shrift. Thank God for Madeline Albright and Warren Christopher's memoirs. Even Bosnia gets a shockingly short treatment in the Bill-book. (Clinton's book is all about his personal life and hatred of all who dare oppose him as evil conspirators.)
The obvious suspect in the attack on Cole was Osama bin Laden and his racist religious bigots of al Qaeda.
My running theme, to be invoked again and again is that I don’t remember any outrage to do something spectacular about it at the time. Clinton has been criticized for doing too little to avenge the Cole, but the incident did not have the nation up in arms. It was treated as a terrible event but a passing one. If the nation doesn't push the panic button, how can it ask its President to? The President represents all of the people. The 2001 WTC attack shook everyone and President Bush acted accordingly. The Cole did not shake up everyone and President Clinton acted accordingly. I think the criticism of Clinton's reaction to the Cole is a bit unfair. If Clinton had a crystal ball that showed him the events of 9/11/01 I'm sure he would have taken stronger military measures and might have even pushed the envelope on the nation's internal security laws if he deemed it necessary.
The “post-cold-war period” of 1991 to 2001 was not a time for overreaction. Revisionist critics on the right want Clinton to have reacted in a post 9/11 manner to an event that took place in the post Fall of the Berlin Wall era. Most of them, most of us, were not calling for more and bigger military action against Al Qaeda before September 11 2001.
DICK MORRIS
The great pundit and player Dick Morris makes a great argument that Clinton really blew it in the anti-terrorism department. He makes his case very well.
Morris was a Clinton advisor for two years and now is a FOX news commentator. His books are so good that I am a fan of his writing and his conservative fortitude. But I wonder if it's morally right to take a President into your confidence in private discussions for two years and then rip him to shred for the next 15 years as a commentator for an anti-Democratic party network. Ike wouldn't have done that.
Morris makes a strong and brilliant argument against Clintons' foreign policy performance. Clinton was all bark and no bite. He failed to react when the WTC was bombed the first time. He sold out to Sadaam.
Morris left the White House on sour notes, and that may be the real reason for his being so vinDicktive..
PARDON THE RICH
One night, about a year and a half before Clinton left office, I was home on Sunday night watching Dateline NBC. The top story was about America’s most wanted fugitive, a man by the name of Marc Rich. The story was not political, it was strictly about a criminal, the man the Justice Department most wanted to put behind bars.
The problem for the FBI was that Marc Rich was safe from arrest and prosecution because he was living overseas. His list of crimes was worthy of the lead episode in the hour long magazine format TV show.]. It was so effective a story that for the next two days I was still thinking about that no good rat Marc Rich and how life just isn’t fair that bums like that can get away with things like that. It was a genuinely disturbing story and I never forgot the name of Marc Rich.
In the final days of Clinton’s presidency, indeed in the final hours, he gave out an extraordinary number of full presidential pardons. Clinton critics and even some of his supporters were appalled at some of the names on the list. Anyone who gets a presidential pardon cannot be prosecuted, period. When I heard that one of the names of the list of pardons was Marc Rich my jaw dropped.
As it turned out, Rich's wife was still in the United States and had been giving lavish gifts to the Clintons for years. Denise Rich was a major contributor to the Clinton election campaign and was a personal pal of both Bill and Hillary. Even Clinton's “destroy the story” apologists couldn’t think up a good excuse for that one.
Clinton goes out with a bang. A very wicked bang.
THE FINGER MAN
My main memory of Bill Clinton is him screaming holy hell against the opposition Republicans while firing out that right hand with the index finger pointed like a gun. “I never did them the way they’re doing us!” while the right hand lashes out the point in a finger jab that could penetrate a cardboard box in its fury.
Then in quiet interview he would smile and call himself a uniter.
Bill Clinton was nowhere near the uniter that President Obama is at this writing in 2012. There is plenty of hatred being thrown at Obama, and he hits back. But compared to most presidents, he hits back in a way that doesn’t fuel the flames. Clinton always did. He was a fighter and not in a good way. He had that Harry Truman ‘it’s always personal’ quality.
HILLARY
The word always was that staffers were never afraid of Bill. But they lived in terror of Hillary. The First Lady was a tiger shark compared to her husband. Bill could get very mad but that didn’t mean you were fired on the spot.
Hillary has gone on to win the NY Senate and is now the Secretary of State in the Obama Administration. She'll write quite a memoir someday on her time in this crucial job.
I just wish she would be more open about her role on the board at Wal Mart in the 1980’s. Her autobiography doesn’t even mention it.
AND THEY CALLED REAGAN THE CONSUMATE ACTOR
For me the bottom line is that when the cameras are on him he can produce real fake tears. That may sound like an oxymoron, but it isn't. The super-cad can produce a fake tear with real water showing. Hillary couldn't. In 2008 she supposedly cried on the eve of the New Hampshire primary as she answered a softball question about “how she is able to do it all as a woman.” She talked about how she didn't want to see this country falling backwards again as she choked up. It was the lead story on all three networks that night and it probably helped her win the NH primary in a surprise.
But her fake crying produced no water. It was weak acting.
Bill Clinton on the other hand is a hustler superstar. He convinced Monica Lewinski that he really cared about her and wanted to be with her forever someday, and that he might even “leave his wife.” How funny is that? Guys? Single guys? He's “in love” with Monica Lewinski?
Hillary Clinton is probably a more moral and sincere person than he is, in spite of her political ruthlessness. If Hillary had let some young limo driver make rude love to her, she could never have convinced him that she really loved him, just to keep him quiet. But her husband could. Even in 1992 Jennifer Flowers was telling the national media that “the truth of the matter is, I loved him.”
A hustler's hustler.
There is an absolutely amazing video out there from Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's burial. Clinton is walking with some friends and smiling and joking around. Then he sees the camera on him and he changes in an instant to grieving friend. He hangs his head, puts on his saddest face and then fake wipes a fake tear from his eye.
Right-wing TV host Rush Limbaugh played this tape over and over for his audience and they howled with laughter. I have only watched Limbaugh twice in my life. I've caught him on the radio a few hours and read his first book. But I don't need conservative leaders to teach me how to be a conservative, and I don't care for his big fat ego. But we're inadvertently on the same team and facts are facts. Rush played the video. If W. Bush had made the same mistake on camera, The David Letterman Show would have played it as a running gag for months. But no one else showed that video which every American should have seen.
TR GETS MEDAL OF HONOR
In the last days of his presidency, in addition to pardoning everyone but Charles Guiteau, Clinton awarded former president Theodore Roosevelt the Congressional Medal of Honor.
TR had fought in the Spanish-America War, and led two charges of troops in the face of heavy enemy fire. Roosevelt at one point was the only man on horseback and was the easiest target for Spanish sharpshooters. After the war Teddy campaigned openly to get himself awarded the Medal of Honor. He wrote to several people saying he deserved it.
I don't know what's worse, the way TR demanded the Medal of Honor, or the idea that Clinton gave it to him.
TR did not deserve this medal. Didn't Clinton understand what it means to win the Medal? This was just another example of a hippie trying to play hawk, who didn't know a damn thing about how to do it.
First of all there are several accounts of Roosevelt's famous “Charge up San Juan Hill.” Some descriptions of the event indicate that TR was never in all that much danger. If he was, he was in far less danger than the black regiment that did the bulk of the fighting, and certainly in far less danger than many other soldiers who 'hit the line hard' and did not request the Medal of Honor for it.
After reading two hundred accounts of the job performances that earned the Medal of Honor I would have to say that even if everything TR said about what happened was true, and even if his best witnesses corroborated it, it simply does not rise to the standard that is set for the highest medal for bravery in military service.
To win the Congressional Medal of Honor, first of all you should die. Few men have lived and won the Medal of Honor. You're supposed to die in an incredible action of self sacrifice and tenacious fighting. You clean out six enemy foxholes single-handedly and then go down in a hail of bullets so that other men can escape from a trap, you win the Medal. If you don't die you at least should have died and it was almost a miracle that you didn't. You almost certainly need to be severely wounded.
I knew a Medal of Honor winner named Tom Kelly from South Boston (only enough to say hello ... as he marched by in a parade) In Vietnam he got much of his face shot off and he continued to give orders and directed the action during a rough firefight as if nothing unusual was happening. Tommy Kelly saved lives, fought hard, and his face looks bad today. Its healed a bit over the decades but it’s deformed. He hasn't marched in the last two parades so maybe he has passed on. If he meets Teddy Roosevelt I hope he can explain to him what it takes to really earn the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Only someone who is anti-military at heart would have the temerity to cheapen the award like that. It's disrespectful to all those who jumped on grenade and died, or fought savagely and lost their right arm to win. Clinton did it to play politics and play with his image.
Clinton never says good things about the Republicans of his own era. But as for yesterday's Republicans, let's score cheap political points by giving one of their popular ex-Presidents a Medal of Honor he does not deserve.
Teddy Roosevelt showed courage on San Juan Hill. He did not show courage in openly campaigning to get himself awarded the Medal of Honor. TR's courage was no better than a hundred thousand other brave soldiers pilots and sailors in America's wars.
The president who deserves the Medal of Honor and doesn’t have it is George Washington. He put himself in close-in personal danger an incredible number of times, changing the course of battles single-handedly while leading his underdog army to ultimate victory. It’s a travesty of justice that TR has it and GW doesn’t.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization was Yasser Arafat and he was one of the most famous people in the world for decades. This terrorist icon for aspiring terrorists was trying to re-invent himself in the Clinton years. By making himself into a new improved diplomat he might win far more concessions and power than with the old ways of blowing up busses and ferries full of innocent Israelis and their supporters.
Arafat became a frequent visitor to Washington D.C. where he would meet somewhat secretly in large windowless basement room at the Capitol with many Congresspersons. They tried to hammer out a compromise agreement for Middle East Peace with Arafat, sometimes with Israeli officials also present, sometimes with only Arafat working out his side of things with the Congressional leaders.
Late one afternoon 16 Congresspersons were having one of these meetings at a large horseshoe shaped table with Arafat in the middle and eight Americans on either side. Suddenly the power went out for about two minutes. Everyone sat in the dark and said nothing until it came back on. Then a Congressman from New Jersey who was seated right next to Arafat started fumbling through his pockets, then turned to Arafat and said in mock seriousness and good and loud,
“Hey! You stole my wallet!”
Whether or not he expected Arafat to go along and laugh at the joke isn't clear. What is clear is that all the Americans began laughing, and those who didn't laugh right away, or tried not to laugh, eventually started laughing. They were all looking at Arafat, who spoke pretty good English, expecting him to fall in and laugh, but he never did. And they didn't bother to stop on his behalf.
Congressman Wexler tells this story in his book, and no one else has ever told it before or since. I love it. It was so American irreverent culture versus the overly serious Arab culture. More important, I think it was comic relief for the Congressman who had mixed feelings about treating this mass murderer so courteously. It was like watching your mean teacher slip and fall on a banana peel. Justice was served in a small way. The joke was s perfect, so just, and such fortunate perfect coming together of circumstances in the name of a little revenge on a big small man. One of the best stories on American political history in my book.
AFTER OFFICE
Bill Clinton has been very active in politics and social work since leaving the White House. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Clinton has been far less partisan out of office than he was in it. He has even struck up a famous new friendship with the man he put out of office, George H. W. Bush. They have appeared on a hundred talk shows or more and have traveled the world working for good causes like hurricane relief, aids care research and prevention and world hunger. My opinion of him has improved, and it may seem vindictive to rail against him at his finest hour. But history will remember him for his actions in his era, not after it.
When Hillary ran for President in 2007-8 she barely ever mentioned Bill in her campaign oratory. It was as if he was a computer salesman that happened to be married to her. When he did campaign for her it sometimes backfired. Bill got the Hillary campaign into a fine mess when he started to criticize Barak Obama, saying his perfect life story was a “big fairy tale.” Bill Clinton, the hero of the black voters in 1992 was called a racist.
Clinton is not aging well physically. He is almost the exact same age as W. Bush and he looks 15 years older. I don't know what's going on with him physically but he crashed fast after office.
CONCLUSION
Clinton forced the Congress, the judiciary, the media, the man on the street and the child in the schoolyard to talk about oral sex as though it were today’s weather forecast.
He was in the last analysis he will forever be the President who couldn’t keep it in his pants.
Representative Bob Dornan said, “Listen to me carefully. I believe Paula Corbin Jones. I think we have a criminal in the White House.”
In a 2005 CBS interview Clinton discussed his impeachment. He said that he was not ashamed by his impeachment but rather saw it as a “badge of honor” that he beat it, and that it was a “bogus phony deal.”
A badge of honor?
It’s a badge of shame that you were impeached. Furthermore, the entire US Houses of Congress who chose to impeach you are not all “bogus” and “phony” people.
I am so glad that I no longer have to look up to him as my leader. It’s one thing to be a liberal that I do not agree with. It’s another to be a criminal slickster. Imagine how good Bill would be if he were a used car salesman? Imagine how bad a George H.W. Bush would have been?
Imagine if your own wife or daughter came to you and said he had groped you or exposed himself. Imagine if all the liberals then said your daughter was lying and started calling her ‘white trash.’ What if you knew she was telling the truth but you couldn’t prove it and she were ridiculed and her reputation impugned by the biased Dem-apologist media. How would that feel?
Monica Lewinski called him, “The big creep.” Yes.
To his credit he never made any disastrous foreign policy moves and he did not let us get pushed around like Jimmy Carter. But his answers to foreign threats were usually half measures, such as lobbing missiles into Sudan after we were victimized by terrorists based there.
His intervention with US air power in the Balkans was complicated and overall the most notable success of his Administration. He also reduced the federal deficit for the first time in ages, and did so in major fashion. Bill Clinton did a good job with the economy.
Clinton was a tough man with the sheep’s clothing of a friendly smile, a great politician of brilliant intelligence. But he was a slave to his sex drive and it cost him what could have been a great place in American history. He could have handed over the job to his VP if he had kept control of his sexual impulses. And he thrived on weak women.
Its not hard to fool the public if you are slick, but as Dwight Moody once said, "Character is what you are in the dark."
To be President you've got to sacrifice personal sin. I can sin all I want and the country will not suffer. But when the President becomes a mega-sinner the whole country pays.
Newsweek correspondent Bill Turque wrote,
“Whitewater and a string of other scandals devoured
hours and energy, producing endless strategy meet-
ings and a parade of administration aides testifying
before grand juries and congressional committees.
… Sometimes it seemed that governance was what
took place in the intervals between long sieges of
damage control.”
SOURCES
All Too Human, by George Stephanopulos. - All Too Apologist. This book by the communications director and close FOB is by its title alone, an apologist work explaining away that the serial sexual harasser was ‘only human.’
George is currently an ABC news analyst, cashing in on his White House fame. Entertainment programs constantly lampooned George for his height, or lack of it. I don’t go much in for that sort of stuff, at least when it comes to physical characteristics that the subject has no control over. Clinton himself told a discussion group of intimates that at five and six years of age he was ridiculed for being a fat kid and it hurt him deeply.
Stephanopulos was one of the only subordinates that was not intimidated whenever Bill Clinton lost his famous temper. In situations where others would cower in fear or at least remain silent, George would calmly respond to screaming Bill as though the conversation was still normal. He was also one of the only FOB who seemed deeply let down by Bill’s scandalous adultery and the shame it brought on the administration overall by proxy. Most of the others were blindly defensive or silent. George had the courage to express (guardedly) that he was let down by the whole thing.
But still he was a Clinton AFB, apologist for Bill.
All's Fair, Love, War, and Running For President, by Mary Matlin and James Carville, with Peter Knobler -c) 1994 -
One is a powerful Republican pundit and player. The other is a powerful Democrat pundit and player. And. Are you ready for this? They're married!
The last thing in the world I want to think about is these two ugly swans in their nightgowns arguing politics. I'd rather picture Michael Moore summo wrestling with Kathy Bates.
If these two are so erudite and wise, why did they need a “with” credit? They just gabbed to a guy with a tape recorder for a few days and they call it a book.
I only bought it because of the price. I got a new hardcover in an overstock bin for a dollar and I may have overpaid. They are the two most disagreeable people of their era, so its perfect that they found each other. Like I'm supposed to be in her corner because she's a Republican. I say that style is substance, so I don't agree with either one of them. Same goes for Ann Coulter and Laura Ingram. I've never agreed with anything they say because their substance counts for nothing without a core decency, a desire to be kind, even if you can't pull it off. Harsh doesn't sell, not for me anyway.
I browsed this book for a useful story or two. So far, so bad.
Behind the Oval Office, by Dick Morris – c) 1997
The human weathervane who got bagged with a hooker.
Morris is so conceited it's sickening. When I see him interviewed, he is perfectly well-behaved and not an arrogant braggart at all, but behind the keyboard, he is really bad. He not only thinks he is a genius, but thinks he would be the top genius in a room full of geniuses from all over the world.
Get over yourself, Morris! Politics is not rocket science.
DM really stabbed the Clinton's in the back in the 00's.
I wouldn't trust Dick Morris as far as Ruth Wenzel can throw an anvil (my mother in law who lives in assisted living up the street, and I know she could beat Dick Morris at Jeopardy. Seriously.)
Boy Clinton, – by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. - c ) 1996
First of all let me say that I went into this red on his side, inhis corner, expecting to find a friend and an ally who bashes a big Dem for all us conservatives. Instead I get a bad person who must have had a bad childhood to be this unfairly hateful towards this President.
I don't like Tyrrell's writing. Only an editor is allowed to write that bad, because they're too powerful to have to submit to an outside editor. I've had to look up so many of his big words that the two inside cover pages are covered with them in my handwriting. Oleagenous? Irenic? Lachrimose? Gimme a break, snob. My computer has already insisted that two of these three are not even words!
Boy Clinton is more about Boy Tyrrell. This is a vicious vindictive biography by the editor of, The American Spectator, a rag that makes Human Events look centrist.
Tyrrell's tirades are too often a personal vendetta based on the cultural wars of the 1960's. He lost on the battlefield of the 1960's so it's revenge at the typewriter in the 1990's with Clinton as a vehicle, but not the real issue.
RT does make a good point now and then in the middle of all the low-blow reaching. For example, R. Emmett argues that left wingers believe that if they embrace enough good causes, it ultimately means they they themselves become great causes. Thank you for that one! And if there's dirt out there on Clinton that's almost unthinkable, let's hear it.
Tyrrell is trying to link Clinton up with some drug-running operations out of a small airport in Arkansas while governor. There isn't much proof, and the evidence R. presents is either boring, or so clogged up by his emotional extra cheap shots, that it's hard to follow.
The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal, -
Now that SB is out of his White House job, and has some time, he’s going to tell the story in extra detail and get everyone back. And he can do it too because he is a great writer.
CW is a fine book, but what a sycophant! How far can one human being go to make a saint out of Bill Clinton?
Sid was an accomplished writer and editor before he became part of Clinton’s inner circle and he certainly was true to his core profession when he wrote this thorough and smooth piece of literature. Sometimes he does get carried away with caring more about how he's writing it than what he's trying to say. There's no doubt he suffers from that conceit. But at least he backs it up most of the time. 'Blu-man' is a great writer except when he tries to be.
SB thinks that everything bad that happened to Clinton was the dirty work of low down dastardly Republicans. At least that is his thesis as far as I can tell. It’s all about demonstrating that Clinton is always the victim.
Sid is a little thin-skinned himself about any criticism that came his way from the press. The Clinton Wars breathes fire and self-defense, its tone matching its title. Sid is at war with anyone who ever criticized Bill Clinton.
I consider this man to be an integral part of the enemy camp. I have gone through several pens with my enraged and saucy rebuttals in the margins.
Too many of the political memoirs of the last 20 years are not erudite at all. This one is a breath of fresh air in that department.
Hell to Pay, by Barbara Olsen. This is a no-holds-barred hatchet job on the First Lady Hillary Clinton by journalist Barbara Olsen who died on September 11, 2001. Olsen was a passenger on one of the jets that crashed into the World Trade Center. Olsen was probably the most famous person to die on that tragic day
It is a good book, although in her introduction she is silly enough to claim to be trying to present a fair and balanced portrait of Hillary Clinton. That would be burst out laughing funny if she hadn't died in the plane. She reaches too far to be mean and that only evokes sympathy for the target. There's a few unbecoming cheap shots. Its better to try and let the facts, as you arrange them, make the right uppercut for you. Adding explanatory emotionalism to punctuate it detracts from the bulls-eye. Don't pile on, on your own tackle. I'm always on the lookout for this fault in my own writing when I'm revising chapters, so I'm quick to spot it in others.
My Life, by Bill Clinton – It's taking half of my life to finish it. Its about 30,000 pages long. I don’t need this much detail on any mortal. Only the general history of a country can justify this much detail.
No editor would allow the kind of self-indulgent boring details in this work under normal conditions. But since Clinton is the President, no one dared to stop him from writing this most egoistic autobiography. Christ himself if he could come back and write his story would not include such useless details.
My Life has a great dose of false humility. As long as you say something good about someone, then it is okay to write six boring paragraphs about that person whose life could provide nothing but an desire to take a nap for any average reader.
The real motive for the writing is to just be self-absorbed. Everything that ever happened to me is so important to everyone else for the obvious reason that I am the greatest person of all time. How else can anyone explain this writing? I’ve read biographies since I was a boy, and I have never read more useless detail about people I could not possibly care about, ever.
Here’s a thrilling section about his grandmother’s brother and his wife ;
Buddy and Ollie had four children, three of whom were gone
from Hope by the time I came along. Dwayne was a shoe
manufacturer in New Hampshire. Conrad and Falba were
living in Dallas, though they both came back to Hope often
and live there today. Myra, the youngest, was a rodeo queen.
She could ride like a pro, and she later ran off with a cowboy,
had two boys, divorced, and moved home, where she ran the
local housing authority. …
My favorite childhood meals were at Buddy and Ollie’s
eating around a big table in their small kitchen. A typical
weekend lunch, which we called dinner (the evening meal
was supper), included ham or a roast, corn bread, spinach
or collared greens, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas,
green beans or lima beans, fruit pie, and endless quantities
of iced tea we drank in large goblet-like glasses. … On
special days we made homemade ice cream to go with the
pie. When I was there early enough, I got to help prepare
the meal, shelling the beans or turning the crank on the ice
cream maker. Before, during, and after dinner there was
constant talk: town gossip, family goings-on, and stories,
lots of them …
… Buddy could tell amazing stories highlighting the
personalities of dogs he’s had five or six decades earlier.
He remembered their names, their looks, their peculiar
habits, how he came by them, the precise way they retrieved
shot birds. Lots of people would come by his house and sit
on the porch for a visit. After they left he’d have a story about
them or their kids.
My high school offered calculus and trigonometry, chemistry
and physics, Spanish, French, and four years of Latin … We
were blessed with a lot of smart, effective teachers and a
remarkable school leader, Johnnie Mae Mackey, a tall,
imposing woman with thick black hair and a ready smile or
a stern scowl as the occasion demanded. Johnny Mae ran a
tight ship.” [end excerpt]
This is several levels deep into the world of boring irrelevance
I wouldn’t care to read this much detail on my childhood.
First in His Class, by David Moraniss, a gently critical biography in mid-presidency my a secret admirer and a liberal at the liberal Washington Post. Well researched and useful. Moraniss stresses an insightful point on where Clinton supposedly grew up. Clinton is always singing about Hope, Arkansas, “a place called Hope.” It has a touching and symbolic ring to it and BC plays it up. But Moraniss points out that Clinton left Hope and moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas at a very early age (6) [check date] and it was Hot Springs that filled in the blank on environment in the heredity versus environment debate. Hot Springs is a racy, fast track town full of tourists and gamblers, quite out of step with Hope, and for that matter, the rest of Arkansas. Clinton’s trouble-making life was influenced by the decadence of Hot Springs, theorizes Moraniss and it the point is a wise addition to Clintonography (although it must be added that the point was first made by the authors of the following book.)
The Comeback Kid
One of the first biographies of Clinton. Almost but not quite a campaign bio, CK was published just after he made president and includes the battle of ’92. The authors are two Arkansas men. It is not hard hitting and it’s primary focus is Clinton’s education plan for the state of Arkansas. Nice photo section and lifemap by David Fike.
Inside the Oval Office, by Dick Morris – c) 1997
I was a fan of this guy until I let him tell his story. What a cretin! What an obnoxious conceited cretin. He makes me like Clinton the more he rips him. He calls other people “cretin” in his writing, so I accept his yardstick.
Morris uses history analogies all the time as if he is an historian, but most of them are lame, or grandiose or both.
Inventing Al Gore, by Bill Turque – Negative biography of Clinton’s Vice President
Lies, And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken – I hate this guy. I hate his books. I never really watch SNL so I really don't know his comedy work. But his political books have too many dirty jokes for my taste and they argue things very simplistically.
They are based on emotional hatreds founded on what it as the least a political superiority complex. But this hate actually, at the most, is just the personal superiority complex grafting itself on to politics in order to expand its base of operations. I don't even think they hate the Republicans as much as they think they do. Its just an excuse to go to war to show off that you are one brave caring and noble warrior, and that makes you that much more wonderful.
Madame Secretary, A Memoir, by Madeleine Albright – Enjoyable and important book, but I never knew she was stuck-up about her intelligence. When I was three, she lived only ten miles from me, at Wellesley College. I was born too late.
I wish the entire book was about her years at the State Department. Spare me the stories about who you dated in college, unless it was Dean Martin, Dean Aecheson, or the Dean at Wellesley.
My FBI, Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, by Louis J. Freeh, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation – c) 2005
This book shines a bad light on both the left and the right. The facts puts the lefty Clinton regime in a bad light. The tone puts the culture-wars-jerk author in a bad light. It makes me feel bad to pick a team, no matter which way I go.
Off With Their Heads, Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business, by Dick Morris, Fox News Political Analyst – c) 2003 Harper Collins
This book bashes the Clintons pretty hard. Morris is such a loyal guy. The way this book exposes the tricks of pollsters who want the results to go a certain way is nothing short of a public service, even though, with his ego, it couldn’t have been meant to be.
Out of Many; A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale), Mari Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke), and Susan H. Armitage (Washington State) - c) 1994 - Prentice Hall
This colorful textbook ends with the Election of 1992. How did a Mount Holyoke Professor get in here? That is about the most run down town in all of New England
The Russia Hand, by Strobe Talbott – Somehow our nation survived US-Soviet policy under the tutelage of Strobe 'I'm always wrong on Russia, the area of my expertise' Talbott.
Having said that, this is a very important and scholarly book. I highly recommend it. I also recommend that I finish reading it past page 60 too, but nevertheless I recommend it. A great political book is one where you have to keep browsing through chapters way ahead of the book-mark because they look so fascinating.
Scandal, How Gotcha Politics is Destroying America, by Lanny Davis – c) 2006 – Davis was a Friend of Bill, but this books makes a genuine attempt to try to handle this issue in a non-partisan fashion. I'm not saying he pulls it off completely, but the effort is praiseworthy. And the writing is primo.
(I found out recently that 'primo' is not really a word but local slang for great. It's not in any of my dictionaries. I played Reno this year and comedian said, “You know what I love about you east coast guys? You use the word 'primo.' )
See, I Told You So, by Rush Limbaugh – The best selling paperback by the king of the right-wing celebrity talk show hosts.
Sometimes I find his commentary useful and a breath of fresh air. But too often I find him personally disgusting and a breath of foul air. If it weren't for his fat ego, he might have even made himself a hero in my house, but he makes fun of people the way a ninth grade bully does, instead of sticking to what is wrong with their arguments. He, like many if not most right-wing talk show hosts is a knee-jerk conservative, the anti-dote to the Air America knee jerk liberal. How can anyone look at a thousand issues and come down hard right on all thousand?
The title of the book is obnoxious in the way he is obnoxious. But sometimes he points out a fact that needed to be said that no one else is saying and he gets attacked as if he is the anti-Christ by the left. I said he had an obnoxious ego. I did not say that should be shut out when he makes himself insightful and useful, and he definitely occasionally does.
The media is so biased to the left that we need someone biased on the right with some clout to fight back for us, even if he is personally offensive sometimes.
I spent a couple of months as a fan until he began ridiculing Democratic Congressman Henry Wexler's nose. That ended that. You're a fat bald guy!
Having said that, between him and Al Franken (Senator Al Franken, the first comedian in the Congress) who attacked him personally in his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, I would shovel Limbaugh's sidewalk for free in a blizzard before I'd throw Franken a life saver if a saw him drowning in the North Atlantic.
Without Hesitation, by General Hugh Shelton - c) 2010
The 6’5” braggart was commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the second Clinton term.
Without hesitation I say that this is one of the most annoying biographies of all time. 90 pages about Shelton’s boring childhood doing chores on the farm and learning leadership in the 4-H club? Is this some sort of a gag? St Martin’s Press didn’t have the courage to stand up to him and cut all these stories out. Gimmie shelter from Shelton. This book should have started when he started to count in this world.
I don’t want to read this much bio on the childhood of a president, let alone an almost famous general. Most Americans don’t really know his name. They almost do, but they don’t. General Shelton doesn’t pass the Peoria test. Can five of any ten people walking down the street in Peoria identify the name accurately? If so, you are famous. Maybe one in twenty knows General Hugh Shelton. But not one in ten. But GHS doesn’t appreciate that because he is the center of nothing but glory and attention. That’s why he suddenly thinks his life story is on the same scale of importance as Patton or U.S. Grant. Either that or he’s just badly self-absorbed.
I will say this. “Baby Huey” didn’t have the grades to go out for varsity basketball at North Carolina University. And he was obsessed with basketball. He speaks of this road-block as a huge disappointment. I get the feeling between the lines that Hugh would like to brag that he could have made the NBA, but he knows he can’t say that. I’ll do it for him. I’ll wager Shelton could have made the NBA if he’d had the grades to get on the North Carolina squad. With his size and determination and aggressiveness, he probably could have been a 7th-man rebounder even if he had a merely fair shooting touch. I never saw film of him playing but that’s just a feeling I get after reading much of this dreadful book.(The Gerald Ford story is the opposite - The NFL drafted Jerry Ford but he turned it down and went into the Navy and then to politics.)
Uncovering Clinton – by Michael Isikoff – Izzy was intricately involved in the exposure of Mr. Indecent Exposure and his book is most interesting, to say the least. He is still on TV often, and I like what I see.
The books that slurp on Clinton's feet always bash Isikoff personally. The guy has a list of credentials a mile long and they make it seem like he's the most disreputable person that ever got published. That's always the way of the Clinton defenders. Bash the source, not the charge.
As of this writing in 2011, Izzy is an NBC TV reporter.
A Vast Conspiracy, The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, by Jeffrey Toobin – c) 1999
I presumed the title was sarcastic, but to my utter shock, this guy actually believes that all the opposition to Clinton, all of the allegations of sexual criminal activity, was indeed part and parcel of a vicious vast right-wing conspiracy.
This isn't a book. Clinton hired a lawyer to write a 400 page brief to defend him in court, and Touchstone agreed to print it and call it a book. This is a real head-shaker. Not even Bill Clinton thinks he is this much of an innocent victim.
Wiser in Battle, A Soldier’s Story, by Lt. General Ricardo S. Sanchez, with Donald T Phillips - c) 2008 Harper
Sanchez writes of the new Shineski concept of warfare in the late 90’s. Sanchez doesn’t name it the SD, the Shineski Docrtrine. I do.
This is a good read but he does get corny about religion. Knock it off.
A Lt. General is an extremely impressive thing. Dwight Eisenhower in 1943 was Lt General, as was Omar Bradley. Patton was not.
PERIODICAL
Washington Times –Obituary for Colonel Homes
(TV and periodical sources – They were too numerous and ongoing to begin to try and file – Suffice to say that during the Clinton era I read the papers and watched CNN and FOX TV like everyone else –
NOT SOURCES – BOOKS NOT CONSULTED BUT WHOSE EXISTENCE IS WORTH NOTING
Target, Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Kathleen Willey – c) 1999
Life isn't fair to a million aspiring authors when someone like this gets a book published. I couldn't bring myself to pay for it, even for cheap.
Bill Clinton has written about eight new books in the last six years. All of them look fluffy and vague to me and are expensive. I don’t own them a this time. If they get old enough and hit the overstock bargain bins, I will. And still won’t read them. Let’s see, I have two hours of time and here is the Complete War Memoirs of Charles, de Gaulle, and beside that a stilted windbag ex-Prez essay on how we can make America great again by helping others in our daily life. Which one should I read? Hmmmm. Decisions decisions. Why retired leaders write one good political book, and then follow it up with ten light and vague works? I think it has something to do with agents and fast money for everyone.
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