Raffarin laments, "Geez, haven't you embarrassed us enough?"
Posted on 02/18/2003 4:54:49 AM PST by BigWaveBetty
Raffarin laments, "Geez, haven't you embarrassed us enough?"
One perhaps should have expected the self-obsessed William Jefferson Clinton to spend his post-White House years engaged in constant revisionism of his presidency. But no modern president has broken with tradition as brazenly as Clinton by simultaneously engaging in revisionism and lobbing armchair criticism at his successor.
Lately Clinton has been all over the airwaves to express his disagreements with President Bush's foreign policy and to cleanse the historical record concerning his own policies.
For instance, Clinton blasted President Bush's efforts on Iraq in an interview in which he asserted that taking action without further authorization from the U.N. would mark a new Iraq war as a "pre-emptive strike."
"We've never done that," Clinton said, "And Democratic powers normally wait to get hit before they hit."
Never? How about December 1998, when Clinton ordered four days of air strikes against Iraq, over U.N. opposition, because he deemed Saddam's regime to be insufficiently cooperative? Nor did Clinton seek U.N. approval for air strikes in 1995 in Bosnia, where Bosnian Muslims needed Western protection.
Regarding North Korea, Clinton now claims that his administration succeeded in convincing North Korea to end its nuclear program, and that he only learned of the North Koreans' duplicity last fall along with the rest of the world. But as early as 1998, news reports, citing Clinton administration sources, noted the possible existence of a North Korean nuclear program. Surely Clinton was aware of his own administration's findings.
We could go on, but the point here is not to detail every new Clinton fib. It is one thing for an old politician to attempt to polish his own image in retirement. Clinton is neither the first nor the last to attempt to do so. But it is quite another to attack his successor with arguments rooted in big lies. Link
This wasn't written by someone we know and love, our very own mountaineer perhaps?
Meantime, his daughter Chelsea Clinton is tipped to win her first job at a firm with a strong India connection. The consulting firm McKinsey, whose Managing Director Rajat Gupta is a Clinton friend, is tipped to hire her. [snip]
Incidentally, the Secret Service flap over Clinton's India trip comes even as the former president's daughter joins an Indian-led firm, after two suffocating years at Oxford under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service.
Chelsea Clinton has recently been interviewed by Rajat Gupta, Clinton's friend and Managing Director of McKinsey and Company. She is tipped to win a $ 60,000 first job at McKinsey's New York office. Hiring her will also be a coup for McKinsey.
It was Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton's visit to India in 1995 that recharged Bill Clinton's curiosity in India after his initial university-day reading on the region at Oxford. Following heightened awareness of the country during his turbulent second term, the former president has maintained his interest even after he demitted office. Full story
Suffocating two years at Oxford because of the SS? Oh puhleeeeze. And we're all so glad we could pay for hillary and chelz's globe hopping and or job search.
This is just wrong. If anybody can write a great editoral it's you. Have your editor call me, I'll set him/her straight. ;-)
New info on the train fire in SK. Just awful
A driver in the underground railway arson attack that left 133 dead might be charged with negligence for fleeing his train and leaving the doors locked, police said yesterday. The blaze, which trapped two trains in Daegu, South Korea's third-largest city, was started by a mentally disturbed man who told police he wanted to commit suicide.
The driver, named only as Choi, and nine other underground officials are being questioned about negligence, the chief police investigator, Cho Doo Won, said. The fire was set on one train in Joongang station. A second train, driven by Choi, was allowed to enter the station, even as the first train burnt at the platform, investigators said. Choi escaped with his master key, leaving passengers trapped in their cars and choking in flames and toxic fumes, Mr Cho said.
Hackers pilfer millions of credit card numbers
Five million credit card accounts were compromised when computer hackers broke into a company that processes US transactions on behalf of Visa and Mastercard.
The two credit card companies say there have been no fraudulent transactions with the stolen card numbers. The precise number of cards involved has not been revealed, but reports suggest that the figure is 5.4 million. The incident only affects US banks, at least one of which has already cancelled thousands of cards. Full story
A GOVERNMENT-backed course is encouraging pupils under 16 to experiment with oral sex, as part of a drive to cut rates of teenage pregnancy.
Family campaigners believe that the course, called A Pause, is having the reverse effect by exciting the sexual interest of children.
The scheme, which has been pioneered by Exeter University and is backed by the Departments of Health and Education, trains teachers to discuss various pre-sex “stopping points” with under-age teenagers. [snip]
Lynda Brine, a teacher from a Doncaster comprehensive who recently attended a training day for the course, says in today’s Times Educational Supplement that she was primed to deal with detailed questions about oral and anal sex. “I was amazed. Are these really the sort of questions to which we as a profession should be responding?” she writes.
“There was no framework for talking about responsibility or the emotional side of relationships. By following this course, I feel that teachers are implicitly supporting under-age sexual activity.” timesonline
Anal sex as well?! Are you bloody kidding?!
"Joe Millionaire" runnerup Sarah Kozer is fit to be tied over the way she was treated by the blockbuster TV reality show.
"I'm horrified," Kozer - who got the boot from fake rich guy Evan Marriott in Monday night's finale - told the Daily News yesterday. "[I'm] completely embarrassed."
She said she and the other 20 women who flew to the French chateau where the show was taped were duped by the show's producer, who never even told them "there was going to be a guy there."
"I thought it was going to be 'Sex and the City' in France," said Kozer, 29, breaking her network-imposed silence from her home in Beverly Hills, Calif.
"The way [they described it], it was going to be 20 single, sophisticated women in France, looking for romance and adventure. Then, once we got there, [they said] 'Oh, it's going to be a dating show.' It was a setup from the get-go. We didn't know what we were getting into."
Isn't that the point you say to the producer, where's my ticket home?
Ronald Reagan Blvd. :-)
It's from Best of the Web Today (OpinionJournal.com)...
The Associated Press reports from Montpelier, Vt., that some bookstores are purging their sales records lest the government use them to combat terrorism. "The Patriot Act approved after the 2001 terrorist attacks allows government agents to seek court orders to seize records 'for an investigation to protect against international terrorism,' " but some booksellers apparently think their customers' privacy is more important than the lives of terror victims. The AP quotes one customer:In case any FBI agents are reading this, that's B-R-E-S-E-E, and Bear Pond Books is at 77 Main Street in Montpelier.
Peggy Bresee was in Bear Pond Books recently to buy War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy as birthday gifts for a son who lives in Utah. She had the store purge the purchase records."It really does make me feel so much better," she said. "They're protecting those of us who are readers. It matters."
Miss Germany Alexandra Vodjanakova arrives in Baghdad with a friend February 20, 2003. Vodjanakova arrived in Iraq declaring she wanted to see President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to try to avert war with the United States. (Akram Saleh/Reuters)
Vodjanakova is in for a rude awakening.
I have a question. When was it made law that intelligence couldn't give information to law enforcement? Was that one of clinton's?
Unbelievable...
WASHINGTON -- Throughout the 1990s, Sami Al-Arian, an outspoken critic of Israel, was secretly watched by two sets of U.S. investigators: FBI (news - web sites) agents looking for evidence of crimes and intelligence officials examining Middle East terrorism.
Neither group knew the extent of the other's investigation of the University of South Florida engineering professor's suspected role as leader of North American operations for a terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
At the time, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agents weren't allowed to compare notes because of laws designed to prevent domestic spying by the FBI, particularly on political and religious groups. But all that changed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when Congress tore down the legal wall that separated the agents by passing the USA Patriot Act. More
Do not confuse this with the national college student strike against the war, scheduled for March 5. Further, do not confuse any of this with anything of actual importance.
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