Posted on 03/12/2015 8:56:43 PM PDT by Steelfish
Early-Onset Clinton Fatigue
by CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER March 12, 2015
Hillary is already reminding us of the notorious Clintonian chicanery of the 1990s. She burned the tapes. Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned. Today you dont burn tapes. You delete e-mails. Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: I didnt see any reason to keep them. After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone. How do we know that? She says so. Were, say, Clinton Foundation contributions considered personal? No one asked.
Its unlikely well ever know. We have to trust her. Thats not easy. Not just because of her history William Safire wrote in 1996 that Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady . . . is a congenital liar but because of what she said in her emergency news conference on Tuesday. Among the things she listed as private were personal communications from my husband and me. Except that, as the Wall Street Journal reported the very same day, Bill Clintons spokesman said the former president has sent exactly two e-mails in his life, one to John Glenn, the other to U.S. troops in the Adriatic.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Mrs. Clinton does not seem well-suited for public service.
Clinton’s a liar. Sounds familiar, a screen name of a very popular early freeper.
Stick a harpoon in her she is done.
For those who may have forgotten what kind of a President Bill Clinton was:
1) Clintons own words show his often expressed innate hostility to, and utter contempt for, the core principles of the American founding:
``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the governments ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees. -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
``The purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people - Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993
``We cant be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans that we forget about reality. -- President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, ``NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful by Debbie Howlett
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare However, now theres a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say theres too much freedom. When personal freedoms being abused, you have to move to limit it. Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995
2) Clinton inevitably pursued his own political advantage at the expense of American interests and national security. Here is just one of many possible examples:
It is well documented that Clinton and the Democrats took illegal campaign money from groups and individuals tied directly to the Chinese Peoples Republican Army. It is therefore not surprising that In January 1998 Clinton went against the advice of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon experts by lifting long-standing restrictions against the export of American satellites to China for launch on Chinese rockets. Not only did he move control over such decisions from the more security-focused State Department to the Commerce Department, but he intervened in a Justice Department investigation of Loral Space & Communications, retroactively enabling Loral to sell critical missile technology to the Chinese. Interestingly enough, Clintons decision was made at the request of Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, whose earlier $1.3 million campaign donation made him the single biggest contributor to the Democratic election effort.
The result, as stated eloquently by syndicated columnist Linda Bowles, was that the Democrats got money from satellite companies and from Chinese communists; China got supercomputors, advanced production equipment and missile technology; Loral got its satellites launched at bargain basement prices . . . and the transfer of sensitive missile technology gave China [for the first time] the capability of depositing bombs on American cities. Incidentally, Loral ultimately failed to benefit from this permanent injury to Americas security interests: in July 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and in order to raise cash was forced to sell its most profitable business a fleet of communications satellites orbiting over North America.
3) On two occasions, Clinton used military action for the specific purpose of distracting the American public from the fallout of the Lewinsky affair:
On August 20, three days after Clinton finally admitted publicly to the Lewinsky affair, the news media was poised to focus on that days grand jury testimony by Monica Lewinsky. That same morning, Clinton personally went on national television to gravely announce his bombing of a Sudanese chemical weapons factory, and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It was the first time most Americans ever heard the name of Osama bin Laden. The factory bombing in Sudan killed an innocent night watchman, but accomplished little else. It later was proven that the plant was making badly needed pharmaceuticals for people in that poverty-stricken part of the world, but no chemical weapons.
Several months later, the U.S. Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, stated: "...the evidence indicates that the facility had no role whatsoever in chemical weapons development." Kroll Associates, one of the world's most reputable investigative firms, also confirmed that there was no link in any way between the plant and any terrorist organization. As for the Afghanistan bombing, it failed to do any damage at all to bin Laden or his organization. Clintons action was accurately characterized by George W. Bush when he said right after 9-11: "When I take action, Im not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.
Clintons pointless and murderous military actions did not make Americans safer that day, although they did destroy an innocent life, and for all the good they did certainly could have been delayed in any case. But they did succeed in diverting media attention from Lewinskys grand jury testimony for a 24-hour news cycle, which was the main point. So I guess, they werent a total loss.
On December 16, 1998, on the eve of the scheduled House vote on his impeachment, Bill Clinton launched a surprise bombing attack on Baghdad. As justification for this exploit, he cited the urgent threat that Saddams weapons of mass destruction posed to America, and the need for immediate action. Almost immediately, the House Democrats held a caucus and emerged calling for a delay in the impeachment proceedings. House minority leader Dick Gephardt made a statement: "We obviously should pass a resolution by saying that we stand behind the troops. I would hope that we do not take up impeachment until the hostilities have completely ended."
Conveniently, a delay so near the end of the House term would have caused the vote to be taken up in the next session when the newly elected House membership would be seated with more Democratic representation, thereby improving Clintons chances of dodging impeachment.
The Republicans did, in fact, agree to delay the hearings, but only for a day or two. Amazingly, Clinton ended the bombing raid after only 70 hours -- once it became clear that in spite of the brief delay, the vote would still be held in the current session.
Once the bombing stopped, Clinton touted the effectiveness and importance of the mission. As reported by ABC News : We have inflicted significant damage on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, on the command structures that direct and protect that capability, and on his military and security infrastructure, he said. Defense secretary William Cohen echoed the point: We estimate that Saddam's missile program has been set back by at least a year.
Whether or not one buys Clintons assessment of that mission, it is difficult to believe that its timing was so critical that it required commencement virtually at the moment the House was scheduled to vote on the impeachment¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that Clinton cynically deployed US military assets and placed military personnel in harms way for purely political reasons.
4) Clintons reckless sexual behavior was a threat to American national security:
Clinton and his supporters have been very effective in persuading large numbers of Americans that the Lewinsky scandal was only about sex. But I see a bigger issue here, because Clinton is on record as saying that he would have done anything to keep knowledge of the Lewinsky affair from becoming public.
To me, that statement raises a very serious question: What if, instead of sending her recorded Lewinsky conversations to Ken Starr, Linda Tripp had instead secretly offered them for sale, say, to the Chinese government? Or to the Russians? Or even to agents of Saddam?
What kind of blackmail leverage would those tapes have provided to a foreign government in dealing with America on sensitive trade, security or military issues? One of the few things Clinton ever said that I believe is that he would have done anything to keep the Lewinsky affair secret. Given his demonstrated track record of selling out American interests for personal or political gain (and there are more examples that I could have cited here), how far would he have gone in compromising Americas real interests in order to protect his own neck when threatened with blackmail?
Pretty far, I believe. Equally distressing is the prospect Clinton might, in fact, have succumbed to foreign black mail on other occasions in order to hide different sexual episodes that ultimately did not become public. There is no way to know, of course, but I prefer presidents for whom such a scenario is not a plausible possibility.
And dont even get me started on the war crime in Kosovo.
WAR IN KOSOVO
During Bill Clintons 1999 NATO-led war in Kosovo which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)
We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.
Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.
But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanian Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a humanitarian war. In March 1999 the same month that the bombing started Clintons State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevics regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.
Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations had been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevics War Crimes trial in the Hague were barely been able to document a questionable figure of perhaps 5,000 bodies and body parts. During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanian Muslims. But none were ever found.
BILL CLINTON ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
During the election cycle of 1992, George H.W. Bush lost his job after Bill Clinton hammered him relentlessly for having caused the worst economy of the last 50 years.
In fact, as CNNs Brooke Jackson has reported: Three days before Christmas 1992, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally issued its official proclamation that the recession had ended 21 months earlier. What became the longest boom in U.S. history actually began nearly two years before Clinton took office. See (See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/31/jackson.recession.primer.otsc/).
By the same token, Clinton is generally perceived as having a stellar economic record during his own presidency, in spite of the fact that the economy was already starting to decline during the last year of his term after the stock market crashed in March 2000.
According to a report by MSNBC: The longest economic expansion in U.S. history faltered so much in the summer of 2000 that business output actually contracted for one quarter, the government said Wednesday in releasing a comprehensive revision of the gross domestic product. Based on new data, the Commerce Department said that the GDP the countrys total output of goods and services shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000. See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3676690/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/gdp-figures-revised-downward/.
Perhaps too early?
Just think of the rush of nostalgia here on FR that another Clinton Presidency will bring./s
I AM SICK OF THE CLINTONS! But then I am in Arkansas.
SICK, SICK, SICK, SICK!
Ask him about the time he climbed a tree on Dickson street, in /Fayetteville, naked as a jay bird to protest the Viet Nam War!
I was up the hill trying to meet a girl but she never showed. A friend of mine who worked for a local radio station recorded a conversation with him in the tree.
If I had known ahead of time, I could have knocked him out of his perch with an Arkansaw chert rock but I was waiting for the girl who never showed.
He cried like a baby when Frank White won the Governor’s position from him.
KRAUTHAMMER at his best is usually not very good.
She's not interested in public service - she's interested in public office.
To her, they are two entirely different things.
I have kept a list of the various satirical names for Hilary Clinton that she has been called over the years on various political chat boards. Some of my favorites
1. PIAPS
2. Hilzilla (Like the monster Godzilla)
3. She of who we do not speak (From the movie The Village)
4. Her Thighness
5. Hillab*tch
6. Hilabeans
7. The Great White Whale
8. Thunder Thighs
9. The Wicked Witch of Little Rock
10. The Smartest Woman in her own mind
11. Buddy
12. Hilaharidan
13. Bill Clinton’s worse 2/3’s
14. BIAPS (B*tch in a pant suit)
15. Hilahog
16. Bitchery
17. Hilary Kleb (After a James Bond villain in From Russia with Love)
18. Satan’s Prom Queen
19. The Queen of Hell
20. The wife of Monica Lewinsky’s boyfriend (A personal favorite)
You can tell alot about a person by the names their enemies give them
The one guy said, "I hear he wants to become president some day."
The other guy said, "I don't know how he would be able to manage that with his woman problem."
They added something about his wife and all I could think was what a bunch of losers. This was at the beginning of Ronald Reagan when things were really looking up.
In 1981 it seemed impossible that the American people would never be so stupid as to vote for such people into the White House.
And yet they did just that four times.
I call her The Rodham.
The interesting thing is that your cheapness accomplishes nothing. I don't agree with the Krauter on everything, but that doesn't mean I take personal offense like you do. Perhaps, I am just more mature and perhaps you are young and immature...I sure hope so.
Ha
How could I have forgotten that one?
perfectly suited for Hell.
Bill’s future ex-wife!
How does Clinton how many emails were deleted?
If you delete them one by one as they come in, you do not know how many over time. But if you have 30,000 of them and know they contain treasonous and other criminal actions you then know the number.
At my place of work I have over 40,000 emails just for 2014.
She has far more then 30,000 or whatever made up number.
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