Bill Clinton

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

[quote]BB wrote (quoting):
I can’t offhand think of a particular speech he’s given that’s memorable and enduring, like Kennedy’s inaugural or Reagan at Westminster or the Berlin Wall. His speeches are in important ways banal, of the moment, and always nakedly partisan and political.[/quote]

I think Clinton’s speech about “building a bridge to the 21st century” would be an example of a speech that will stand the test of time.

You also wanted to know “one good economic bill” that he passed… how about welfare reform???

Ya know, I did like Clinton although I certainly didn’t agree with everything he did. But when the whole Lewinsky scandal broke, I knew right away he was doomed, and he really screwed up on some level, even if the charges would turn out to be true or not.

I think that contrasts with some of the rabid Bush supporters here, MANY of whom seem to REFUSE to admit that Dubya could ever do anything seriously wrong. I wonder what it will take, for these people to finally admit (if ever) that George W Bush has made some major mistakes during his term.

22

“but care to name any economic legislation he originated that was passed?”

NAFTA - what a piece of shit that has turned out to be…

23

[quote]DPH wrote:
“but care to name any economic legislation he originated that was passed?”

NAFTA - what a piece of shit that has turned out to be…[/quote]

He didn’t originate that – that was started under Reagan and basically finished under Bush I. Clinton, to his credit, argued for it, but you could hardly say it was his idea or that he origingated it.

And I assume you’re being facetious about its effects, but that’s for another thread anyway.

24

[quote]Lumpy wrote:
BB wrote (quoting):
I can’t offhand think of a particular speech he’s given that’s memorable and enduring, like Kennedy’s inaugural or Reagan at Westminster or the Berlin Wall. His speeches are in important ways banal, of the moment, and always nakedly partisan and political.

I think Clinton’s speech about “building a bridge to the 21st century” would be an example of a speech that will stand the test of time.

You also wanted to know “one good economic bill” that he passed… how about welfare reform???

Ya know, I did like Clinton although I certainly didn’t agree with everything he did. But when the whole Lewinsky scandal broke, I knew right away he was doomed, and he really screwed up on some level, even if the charges would turn out to be true or not.

I think that contrasts with some of the rabid Bush supporters here, MANY of whom seem to REFUSE to admit that Dubya could ever do anything seriously wrong. I wonder what it will take, for these people to finally admit (if ever) that George W Bush has made some major mistakes during his term.[/quote]

Republican bill. The only reason clinton ever agreed to it is because Dick morris, former republican advisor told him it would be good for his numbers

25

Pyotr,

“Clinton wasn’t fluff. He was forced to divert all his attention from being the president by loser Republicans who were obsessed with his blow jobs. Pathetic.
Clinton was so poorly treated by Republicans that it will unquestionably go down in history as one of the greatest Moments of Shame in our history, along with shipping Japanese Americans to interrment camps during World War II and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of blacks.”

This is hyperbolic jibberish. Clinton spent 8 years in office. The investigation was not a great moment of shame, but the culmination of partisan politics and a very sorry track record of boorish behavior by a President.

Very few people were actually that worried about his oral adventures with chubby interns. It reflected on his character, no question, but the outrage over adultery and abuse of power was at most a vote-changer if he faced another election. The real problem is the charge of lying before a federal grand jury when you are the chief executive of the US - hence the impeachment proceedings.

What you suggest - that loser Republicans who are obsessed with his blow jobs - is actually opposite of what is true. It is the Clinton apologists who are the ones obsessed about the blow jobs. The loser Republicans, while not impressed by Clinton’s sexual shenanigans, have always been concerned about the issues of the President committing perjury.

The rest - comparison of the Clinton investigation to Japanese internment and the institution of slavery - is positively laughable. I can’t take anything you say seriously.

26

No one is perfect. And every Presidet from George Washington, to George Bush Jr. have made msistakes. Or did things that they regret they did, or did not do. NO matter how great the President is. And I will admit George Bush Jr had made mistakes too. And I have been critical on George Bush Jr. On some of these mistakes too.

However, when you compare it to the mistakes Clinton did. They are nothing like Bushes’ mistakes. WHich he will not talk about,and wants the country to forget about.

Like the pardons:
Clinton gave 140 pardons his last day of office… Clinton’s pardons unfolded (some given to campaign contributors, one to a cocaine trafficker, and one to fugitive Marc Rich) he was subject to severe and lingering criticism.

Or how about Bill CLinton pardoning the FALN?

Clinton and the Chinese

http://www.usvetdsp.com/story23.htm

http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/chinese.htm

http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1114.cfm

Clinton and the Intelligence
The Wall Street Journal
November 6, 2000

Clinton Vetoes Intelligence Spending Bill,
Including Easier Prosecution of Leaks

http://www.mediamonitors.net/espac1.html

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/43

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/43

Clinton and the Military
Former presidential aide and retired Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel “Buzz” Patterson. The U.S. military continues to be haunted by Clinton-era policies, including low pay for military personnel, a severely reduced fighting force, and a curtailed research and development program, stated Patterson.

Clinton “inherited the world’s strongest fighting force,” but reduced its size “by a third to a half, depending upon the branch of the service,” Patterson said.
We don’t have the capability anymore, we don’t have the strength, the mobility assets, the number of troops, the number of divisions," Patterson lamented.

Military pay under Clinton failed to keep up with civilian earnings, resulting in the creation of an entirely new class of poverty - the “military poor” - revealed Patterson

At the same time Clinton reduced America’s military force, he committed U.S. troops to more trouble spots than ever before. The number of deployments in the Clinton administration rose from eigtht in the previous 45 years, to 40 military interventions during the Clinton years, Patterson noted.

“Most [of the deployments] were for political benefit, for CNN sound bites,” Patterson said. "Many of those interventions were poorly planned, said Patterson, using the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia as an example, where the U.S. suffered humiliation at the hands of lightly armed rebels.

The Clinton administration had virtually no respect for the military, with attitudes shaped by ignorance of the armed forces or by ideological hostility to the military, Patterson said.

At the same time Clinton reduced America’s military force, he committed U.S. troops to more trouble spots than ever before. The number of deployments in the Clinton administration rose from eigtht in the previous 45 years, to 40 military interventions during the Clinton years, Patterson noted.

“Most [of the deployments] were for political benefit, for CNN sound bites,” Patterson said. "Many of those interventions were poorly planned, said Patterson, using the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia as an example, where the U.S. suffered humiliation at the hands of lightly armed rebels.

Morale plunged in the military under Clinton, Patterson said, as the administration’s disregard for the military became increasingly apparent.

http://inatoday.com/defenserisk.htm

All of this and so much more are what so many sites say…And it is all true…No lies…And again everything which George bush Jr, inherited. ANd many of which cannot be fixed overnight… Mistakes which Bill CLinton wants you to forget about totally… Because it ruins his legacy…

Joe

27

[quote]Lumpy wrote:
BB wrote (quoting):
I can’t offhand think of a particular speech he’s given that’s memorable and enduring, like Kennedy’s inaugural or Reagan at Westminster or the Berlin Wall. His speeches are in important ways banal, of the moment, and always nakedly partisan and political.

I think Clinton’s speech about “building a bridge to the 21st century” would be an example of a speech that will stand the test of time.

You also wanted to know “one good economic bill” that he passed… how about welfare reform???

Ya know, I did like Clinton although I certainly didn’t agree with everything he did. But when the whole Lewinsky scandal broke, I knew right away he was doomed, and he really screwed up on some level, even if the charges would turn out to be true or not.

I think that contrasts with some of the rabid Bush supporters here, MANY of whom seem to REFUSE to admit that Dubya could ever do anything seriously wrong. I wonder what it will take, for these people to finally admit (if ever) that George W Bush has made some major mistakes during his term.[/quote]

I don’t presume to know which speeches will stand the test of time – that was the opinion of Jacob Levy, but I’ll defer to his judgment.

As to the question I posed, it was economic legislation Clinton “originated” – or, if not that, at least that the Democrats initiated during his tenure. You can’t just credit him with what the Republican Congress rammed through.

28

[quote]slimjim wrote:
Past history be damned, it’s the person’s policies that matter most to me.[/quote]

Seems to me that Clinton has a past history of promising and not delivering, which seems to me like it hamstrings his policies.

As far as Kerry goes, I’m just not impressed. Lots of fluff and dumbass ideas, but that’s what Clinton had, too – and in the end, it’s what we got. Fluff.

I don’t like some ot the things Bush is doing in office, but at the very least, he is doing something. It is something he believes is right. It is something that divides the country along rather sensitive boundaries. And while I do not agree with everything he does, I cannot help but respect the balls it takes to stand up and do them. And while that doesn’t make a PERFECT president – who would do all the things I want and nothing I don’t – it does make a pretty damn good one.

Kerry is just another democratic dumbass who makes a lot of promises, but will ultimately accomplish absolutely nothing. If Kerry is elected, he’ll do some stupid little high-profile things to placate the electorate, pretend to implement some of the things he’s promised, blame his failure to accomplish anything on the republicans, and then sit around with his thumb up his ass. Hey, it got Clinton reelected.

29

Wall Street Journal
That '90s Show
July 28, 2004; Page A12

Ah, the glorious, roaring 1990s. Bill Clinton got elected, raised taxes on the rich so that the budget deficit and interest rates fell, and thus kicked off one of the great booms in economic history. Then Al Gore lost the 2000 election – sorry, had it stolen – President Bush cut taxes, and the economy more or less immediately went to hell.

In case you’ve missed the speeches, this is one of the major story lines emerging from this week’s Democratic conclave in Boston. As Mr. Clinton boasted in his Monday stemwinder, he left America in 2001 with “peace and prosperity.” So elect John Kerry, we are told, and he’ll take us back to the Clinton policies, starting once again with a tax increase that will reduce the deficit and return us to the happy days before Osama bin Laden, Enron and the “middle-class squeeze.”

This all sounds so good that even we’d like to believe it. There’s just the small matter that it isn’t even close to being the real economic history of the 1990s. Allow us to recall a few of the missing details amid this nostalgia trip, starting with the fact that the Clinton years began by inheriting a recovery that was finally gathering steam. The economy grew by more than 4% in 1992, including 4.5% in the fourth quarter, too late to re-elect George H.W. Bush but enough to give the Clinton era a running start.

Mr. Clinton did pass a tax increase in the summer of 1993, but only after Senate Democrats stripped out his new BTU tax and Senate Republicans killed his spending “stimulus.” The expansion stumbled in early 1993, no doubt partly on tax-hike uncertainty, then revived late in the year. In 1994 stock markets were flat but interest rates actually rose throughout the year (as the nearby chart shows), peaking on the very day in 1994 that Republicans took Congress. That turned out to be the real start of the 1990s boom.

In economic policy, the rest of the decade was a stalemate between Mr. Clinton and the GOP majority on Capitol Hill. The Republicans prevailed on a capital-gains tax cut and the balanced budget, which Mr. Clinton first resisted and then embraced in part to block (successfully) GOP entitlement reforms. Congress actually cut discretionary federal spending in 1995, for the first time since 1981, and defense spending continued to fall.

A kind of virtuous Beltway gridlock took hold, with Washington doing little to get in the way of the private-sector’s natural animal spirits. As the telecom and tech bubbles expanded, taxes from rising capital gains and stock-option payouts boosted federal revenues to a post-World War II high as a share of GDP (20.9%). And with budget surpluses rolling in, both parties began to spend like liberals once again after 1998.

Then the bubble burst – not in 2001, but starting in 2000. The tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked in March of Bill Clinton’s final year in office. The National Bureau of Economic Research now says the economy shrank by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2000 – albeit too late for voters to feel it that November. After a fourth quarter blip in growth, the economy slipped into recession by the formal definition (at least two consecutive quarters of declining GDP) in the first half of 2001.

In other words, the “Bush recession” began for all practical purposes on Mr. Clinton’s watch. The spectacular popping of the dot-com bubble also meant that at least some of the wealth created in the late 1990s had been an illusion. While productivity gains and much of the growth were real, the over-investment in telecom and other areas was so great that it has taken years to recover.

As we later learned, the corporate scandals that burst into public view in late 2001 also began in the 1990s. Set aside who and what caused them, this timing meant that the Bush Administration had to clean up after the scandals, and the regulatory costs associated with that cleanup (Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.) caused a further delay in the recovery of business confidence and spending.

With all of this, as well as the aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror, the amazing thing is that the recession was so short and mild by historical standards. The economy has now been expanding since late-2001, moving to more rapid growth in mid-2003 after the Bush marginal rate tax cuts were accelerated. There have been mistakes (too much non-defense spending) and budget deficits have returned, but the U.S. has led the rest of the world out of the doldrums. Despite the current political fighting over jobs, today’s national jobless rate of 5.6% is about where it was (5.4%) when Mr. Clinton took credit for prosperity while campaigning for re-election in 1996.

All of this is relevant today because the Kerry Democrats want Americans to remember the 1990s as a Periclean-Clinton Age, while blaming the Bush Administration for the costs of cleaning up after the bubble and fighting the war on terror. If only we’ll return to the Clinton mix of tax hikes to finance more spending on health care and education, they now say, the boom will return. As you can see, that wasn’t – and wouldn’t be – the half of it.

30

[quote]CDarklock wrote:
I don’t like some ot the things Bush is doing in office, but at the very least, he is doing something.
[/quote]

Exactly what the hell IS he doing, besides occupying Iraq for the next 10 to 20 years? Besides Iraq (a dubious accomplishment at best) and tax cuts running up a record deficit, what else is Bush doing?

Riiiggghhht…! So, he only did it to be popular, eh? Duh? That bill totally alienated his base. How about some common sense? I know it pains you to think that Clinton was a moderate who was able to accomplish things on a bipartisan basis, but give it a try. Lets not try to rewrite history.

Riigghhhtt…! The Lewinsky scandal and all the other sex (non)scandals were part of Kenneth Starr’s sickening Whitewater witch hunt. After 6 years of harrassment, when Starr couldn’t nail the Clintons on ANY financial wrongdoing, the Starr investigation turned to sex, which was beyond the legal scope of their investigation.

Interesting then, how Bush and Cheney REFUSED to testify under oath before the 9-11 commission, and insisted on only testifying informally, together? Boy, I guess they realized that the perjury thing can really bite you in the ass later!

Man, if lying about adultery can get you into trouble, just think of the hot water you can get into over lying under oath about acts of war!

31

You think Clinton could beat Bush?

How about Mighty Mouse fighting Superman?

How about the drubbing Clinton would have taken in 1984 against Ronald Reagan?

How about Lincoln versus Jimmy Carter?

Why am I speculating, I’ve got better things to think about.

JeffR