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.
If he wanted to undertake a humanitarian war to stop genocide, how is it that Rwanda wasn't even on his radar? Eight hundred thousand documented deaths occured in 1994.
You mean...they lied to us!? I'm SHOCKED!
That's only partly true. In the past year or so we have found several mass graves containing countless bodies.
The were, however, all found in Iraq.