Free Republic

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Monday he would have preferred to leave the White House in a coffin because he loved being commander in chief, but signaled his political life is over. "It's good that we have a (term) limit. Otherwise I would have stayed until I was carried away in a coffin. Or defeated in an election," Clinton said at a conference in Istanbul. "I loved doing the job."

Baby boomer and former president Bill Clinton is laying plans to celebrate his 60th birthday in grand style with a charitable fundraising extravaganza in New York late next month that will include an invitation-only concert by the Rolling Stones and contributor packages that run to $500,000.00 and higher. Clinton's daughter, Chelsea is serving as co-host of the three-day party. She will host a Saturday brunch on a weekend that also features a golf tournament at the Bayonne (N.J.) Golf Club, multiple receptions and a dinner at the American Museum of Natural History with the former president, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton...

There was no Clinton pillow talk over the former first couple's split on the Dubai port deal - because the ex-president's lips were sealed. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed yesterday that her husband never confided in her that he was advising Dubai leaders...

Ex-President Bill Clinton said Monday that he had to assure world leaders that there was nothing seriously wrong with America after the Congress impeached him in 1998. "During that time, a lot of world leaders would ask, 'What is going on? Is this serious?'" he told New York magazine. "I kept assuring them that nothing bad had happened to America," he recalled, "but that we periodically went through spasms." Interviewed while traveling in Africa, the ex-president claimed, "Africans saw [my impeachment] for exactly what it was: an abuse of power." "They got it here," he insisted. The magazine noted that...

Ex-fugitive Marc Rich is suspected of having become one of Saddam Hussein's middlemen in Iraq's illegal oil trade just a month after he won a controversial pardon from former President Bill Clinton, a news report said. ABC News reported last night that Rich's alleged role in the growing UN oil-for-food scandal is under investigation by federal officials. Rich, who was pardoned by Clinton in January 2001, and several other prominent oil traders are suspected of making illegal kickbacks to Iraq to win the lucrative oil contracts, the network reported. The UN program was set up in 1996 to help Iraqis...

An account by a former CIA official reported by NBC News Tuesday night directly contradicts ex-President Bill Clinton's claim that he gave the CIA standing orders to kill 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden if the opportunity presented itself. Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told NBC's Lisa Myers that the Clinton White House required the CIA to capture bin Laden alive rather than kill him. The directive "reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him," said Schroen, who was responding...

IN SEARCH OF A LEGACYClinton: Muhammad would let ladies driveFormer president challenges traditionalists in Saudi Arabia speech Posted: January 19, 20045:00 p.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, former President Bill Clinton told a Muslim audience Islam's founder Muhammad would have let women drive if cars had been around 1,400 years ago. Former President Bill Clinton Clinton urged the Muslim kingdom, which follows the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, to not resist the "tide of change" in the world and seek ways of broadening political participation "without compromising your faith and culture," Reuters reported. Saudi Arabia bars...

JEDDAH: Former US President Bill Clinton urged Saudi Arabia on Monday to push ahead with reforms, saying the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom could not fight the "tide of change". In a challenge to traditionalists in the birthplace of Islam, where women cannot drive and say they are marginalised, Clinton said if cars had been around 1,400 years ago Prophet Mohammad would have let his wife get behind the wheel. "He probably would have made Saudi Arabia the first automobile producing nation on earth and put her in charge of the business," Clinton told a conference in Saudi Arabia 's Red...

Why Can’t Bubba Vote Democrat? by Allen Snyder OpEdNews.Com ‘Bubba’, you may recall, is the generic name for the guy Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean appealed to; the blue-collar white guy with the pick-up, Confederate Flag (if he’s a Southerner – the North has its Bubbas, too), gun rack, spit cup, NASCAR ball cap, ‘I Pledge to One Nation Under God’ bumper sticker, and big chip on his shoulder. It’s false that people who like NASCAR, Confederate flags, and guns are Bubbas and, being a professional critical thinker, I see the gross overgeneralization involved in saying so. Instead, we’ll say...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former President Clinton praised the capture of Saddam Hussein and said the ousted Iraqi president finally will answer "for decades of tyranny and murder." "I am glad he was captured alive so he can be brought before the bar of justice," Clinton said Sunday in a statement. Clinton saluted U.S. troops, who found the bearded and disheveled former dictator in an underground hide-out on a farm near his hometown, Tikrit. Clinton also congratulated his successor in the White House. "Saddam Hussein's capture is a tribute to the skill and bravery of our troops and the good...

"Saddam is gone and good riddance," former President Bill Clinton said yesterday, but he urged President Bush to resist trying to get even with nations that opposed the war. "There are German and French soldiers in Afghanistan today. Does the President want them to come home?" Clinton said at a Manhattan forum on corporate integrity. He praised Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for their handling of the war, but said Bush should have waited longer before attacking for the "chance that either [Saddam Hussein] would have disarmed or ... we would have had far more members of the Security...

William Jefferson Clinton will fetch a handsome $10 million plus to write his memoirs, but that's only if he completes the manuscript. Already, we have inside information that he's struggling with the first sentence: 1st DRAFT: Once upon a time, on a girl called Hope ... (crumple, crumple) 2nd DRAFT: Once upon a time, in a town called Hope, I was looking for a place to dispose of Vince Foster's body when ... (crumple, crumple) 3rd DRAFT: Be honest. You know why you purchased this book. You want juicy details about the defining episode of my presidency. Well, you've come...

Book Bombshell: Iraq Attack Scrubbed for Clinton Golf Game Ex-President Bill Clinton kept a squadron of F-117 stealth fighter-bombers and B-52s waiting to launch a critical 1996 air strike on Iraq while he finished watching a golf tournament - dithering so long that U.S. pilots lost the cover of darkness and the mission had to be scrubbed. That's the explosive charge leveled in a brand new book by Lt. Col. Robert Patterson, a key Clinton military aide from 1996 through 1998 whose primary mission was to carry the president's copy of America's nuclear launch codes. "We dispatched eight F-117 stealth...

Former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart angrily defended his old boss yesterday against a 1978 rape allegation and charges that he blew a deal for Osama bin Laden's arrest, after talk radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested the ex-president should be asked about the two scandals during upcoming appearances on CBS's "60 Minutes." "Bill Clinton won't talk about the stuff the American people really want to know. He's not going to address Juanita Broaddrick or giving the North Koreans two nuclear reactors to play with or rejecting three offers to take custody of bin Laden," Limbaugh said yesterday. Bristling over...

Ex-president Bill Clinton is claiming that the Bush White House turned to him in April 2001 to help solve the crisis prompted by China's downing of a U.S. surveillance plane over the South China Sea - and that the Bush administration would use him more except for the objections of "right wingers." "The Administration's only asked me to do two things," Clinton tells the Atlantic Monthly for its March issue. "One is to go to East Timor, which I was happy to do. The other was to talk to Jiang Zemin. Both of us happened to be in Hong...

[This is the transcript of an interview between former President Bill Clinton and James Fallows, of The Atlantic Monthly, on October 21, 2002. It occurred at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Clinton was in Fayetteville to deliver a speech on foreign policy honoring his mentor, the late Senator J. William Fulbright. Also present at the interview were two of Clinton's associates from Arkansas, including Rodney Slater, former Secretary of Transportation. Clinton and his group arrived 45 minutes late. Clinton strolled into the interview room and took out a cigar, which he never lit. The transcript that follows, which was prepared...

It looks like ex-President Bill Clinton has his own Axis of Evil, although the threats he warned about yesterday have nothing to do with terrorism. "(The Republicans) have a much better media machine than we do," Clinton insisted to "Today" show host Katie Couric, before naming, "Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity," who he said "are very outspoken, and are on the right wing of the Republican Party." Other cogs in the GOP's "media machine," according to the ex-president, include the Heritage Foundation and "sympathetic newspapers and sympathetic cable programs that are heavily weighted in their favor." "There...

Mikhail Gorbachev is teaming up with former US president Bill Clinton and actress Sophia Loren to record a new version of the classic children's musical "Peter and the Wolf." Retitled "The Wolf and Peter", the remake of Sergei Prokoviev's tale will tell the story from the point of view of the wolf, faced with the encroachments of urbanisation on his dwindling forest habitat.

<p>An hour with Larry, a night with Mick — even moments with Mikhail and Sergei: Former President Clinton has had a full dance card this week.</p> <p>Thursday night, Mr. Clinton spent an hour with CNN's Larry King, talking over terrorism, the Space Shuttle Columbia, an encounter with former Vice President Al Gore, his daughter's new boyfriend, tax cuts, his memoirs, his charitable work, his tendency to be a "pack rat" and the recent travails of former Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott.</p>

Was poking around DU a few minutes ago and came across this (coloring mine): Tonight Thursday, February 06, 2003 Exclusive: Former President Bill Clinton joins Larry live for the hour. (LOL, should be some interesting posts here on FR tomorrow.)