It was George Will who said that Clinton was not the worst president in history, but he was the worst man ever to be president.
Please... How could Fred Barnes even think of tarnishing Calvin Coolidge like that. We need more presidents like Coolidge.
Clinton's problem is simple.
Not even Clinton can get away with a book that completely ignores reality. He has to talk about Monica, etc., in the book because every one knows pretty much what happened. The only real debate between the American people is whether or not he should have been impeached (and count me as one who thinks he should have been).
Now, the same American media that has turned smut into a spectator sport is going to focus on the affair. They aren't going to spend much time on Clinton's policies or (alleged) accomplishments because they aren't "sexy" enough.
So, basically, Clinton is out promoting his book and, whether he wants to or not, reminding people that he was a skirt chasing serial liar. He is cementing his reputation as a satyr not a leader.
bump
I guess that's what happens after a Humming Lewinsky!
Har! Har! Har!
Sorry, I'm a little full of myself this AM.
Clinton is not a failed president, only an insignificant one.
It figures that Clinton’s two “great accomplishments” would be lies.
First lie: Clinton's inherited an economy that had been growing for almost two years, and left with an economy in shambles.
CNN’s 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.”
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 country’s total output of goods and services — shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000.”
Second lie: Clinton’s toppling of Milosevic was a war crime the likes of which we have not seen from any American president.
In that NATO-led assault – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and deliberately shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)
We deliberately 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 Albanians 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 – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s 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.
Now, five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations have been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague have 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 Albanians. But none have been found.
"Clinton was a president of little consequence."
His legacy is really measured only by the harm he did to the country.
And his book tour seems very unimportant now, in light of Paul Johnson's beheading.
His one chance for greatness was blown.
Oops,I thought the title had somethng to do with Hitlery putting something in Bill's coffee to make "Little Bill" shrink!
"Clinton faced no great challenge to which he could respond boldly and successfully. He was president during the period Charles Krauthammer has dubbed a "holiday from history." In fact, Clinton has complained he had no major war or crisis to confront."
I wish people would stop repeating this garbage. The Islamics began their war on America in 1993, and Clinton had the opportunity then to confront it, make it the cause which GW has enunciated ten years later. But Clinton was and is a puny, weak little man and he ducked it.
Clinton lived and thrived by corruption and connivance. He had no concept of leadership, largely because he had no sense of mission other than self-aggrandizement. To engage the terrorist factions in 1993 would have required him to exercise leadership, build public awareness and support, work hard and do unpopular things. He had no character, so these options were impossible.
His own statement, "lamenting" that he had no great challenges, is not a statement of fact. It is an excuse for dereliction and inadequacy. I'm disappointed that Barnes, and Krauthammer for that matter, don't get this.
I'm going to sit back and enjoy watching the liberal hawking media fail in its attempt to make this a Clinton worshiping summer. Face it folks, the majority of Clinton's followers/worshipers aren't of the book buying variety. The Clinton's have another feather in their caps which will truly hurt their book sales: Nearly a decade of deliberate dumbing down of America's children.
Dan Rather's endorsement of the Clinton book and of the failed president should and do raise a Red Flag, who would believe either of them........?
"Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard' and a very insightful man with a high emotional intelligence quotient.
Or that Stinking Clinton
ping; read later
I'm pretty sure there's a pill for that. Or a cigar.
