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deconstructing clinton… "just because I could"
FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU! FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME!
COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005
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C-SPAN asked noted presidential historians to rank the American presidents1 along the following ten dimensions: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursued equal justice for all, and performance within context of times.
bill clinton emerged as middling in most dimensions; he was surpassed in others by a settled mediocrity (Carter) and a putative failure (Nixon). In moral authority, bill clinton was rated dead last.2 He did fairly well in public persuasion, not a surprising finding given the volume of snake oil he managed to peddle during his so-called presidency.4
Clinton's best scores were on the economic management and pursued equal justice for all dimensions. However, both of these results are meaningful only insofar as they redound to the moral authority dimension: they are wholly based on clinton fraudulence, cooked books and black poses, respectively; and clinton's shameless Rosa Parks eulogy last week assured us that the insidious brand of clinton racism is alive and well during these tiptoe years of what the clintons hope will be their interregnum.
Note that although Brinkley doesn't place much importance on the economic management dimension--he argues that the economy variable is not durable over time--he fails to recognize that the evaluation of the clinton economy by the historians is erroneous to begin with.
Note also that C-SPAN historians found no evidence of clinton "greatness" irrespective of his moral-authority deficit, contrary to Douglas Brinkley's claim made at the clinton revisionist confab3.
(NOTE: My later research has revealed that Brinkley's qualified mention of clinton "greatness" was not a claim but rather a polite guest's white lie about an abject loser. Instead of taking the AP report at face value, one must carefully parse Brinkley's actual words and especially note the subjunctive construction.)
If 9/11 taught us anything, it is that presidential character and moral authority count, and count most.4 If the variables are properly weighted, bill clinton will always come out dead last.
That is, unless Americans are dumb enough to make the same mistake twice.5, 6
Mia T, 11.10.05
by Mia T, 11.14.05  (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE) |
Twenty presidents rank higher than bill clinton and 20 rank lower. But this placement assumes equal weight for each of the dimensions. And therein lies the flaw.
RE: a not-so-modest proposal concerning hillary clinton
Hillary Clinton's revisionist tome notwithstanding, 'living history' begets a certain symmetry. It is in that light that I make this not-so-modest proposal on this day, exactly 64 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The context of our concern today--regardless of political affiliation--is Iraq and The War on Terror, but the larger fear is that our democracy may not survive.
We have the requisite machines, power and know-how to defeat the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere, but do we have the will?
In particular, do we have the will to identify and defeat the enemy in our midst?
Answerable to no one, heir apparent in her own mind, self-serving in the extreme, Hillary Clinton incarnates this insidious new threat to our survival.
What we decide to do about Missus Clinton will tell us much about what awaits us in these perilous new times.
COMPLETE LETTER |
Dear Concerned Americans,
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THE (oops!) INADVERTENT ADMISSIONS OF BILL + HILLARY CLINTON part one
UNITED 93:THE CLINTON-9/11 NEXUS
"We have to do it now. We know what happens if we just sit here and do nothing...."
CLINTON: 'Can we kill 'em tomorrow?'
(+ Albright-Fulbright-Nobel TERRORISM revelations)
WHY DID BILL CLINTON IGNORE TERRORISM?
Was it simply the constraints of his liberal mindset, or was it something even more threatening to our national security?
'The Path to 9/11' Annotated:
CLIPS, SYNOPSIS, THE CLINTON-9/11 NEXUS, THE CLINTON JACKBOOT
'The Path to 9/11': CLINTON FAILURE TO ORDER 'PURE KILL' CUT CHANCES OF GETTING BIN LADEN IN HALF
HEAR 'THE PATH TO 9/11' SCREENWRITER:
CLINTON WILLFULLY FAILED TO NAIL BIN LADEN AS MANY AS A DOZEN TIMES: CIA
IT TAKES A CLINTON TO RAZE A COUNTRY
BIN LADEN FINGERS CLINTON FOR TERROR SUCCESS (SEE FOOTAGE)
THE THREAT OF TERRORISM IS AS CLOSE AS A CLINTON IS TO THE OVAL OFFICE
UNITED 93:THE CLINTON-9/11 NEXUS
"We have to do it now. We know what happens if we just sit here and do nothing...."
MISSING CLINTON AUDIO! 'Can we kill 'em tomorrow?'
(+Albright-Fulbright-Nobel TERRORISM revelations)
WHY THE CLINTONS FAILED "TO CAPTURE OR KILL THE TALLEST MAN IN AFGHANISTAN"
(DID THEY REALLY WANT TO TAKE HIM OUT ANYWAY?)
ALBRIGHT INDICTS CLINTON FOR TERRORISM FAILURE (and doesn't even know it)
'MAKE IT A RULE' -- PLACE YOUR ORDER FOR OSAMA WITH CLINTON and CO.
(HEAR HILLARY + BILL MAKE THEIR PITCH)
THE (oops!) INADVERTENT (TERRORISM) ADMISSIONS OF BILL + HILLARY CLINTON (HEAR HILLARY IN SF)
HILLARY GOES NUCLEAR
PROLIFERATION IN THE AGE OF CLINTON
THE FAILED, DYSFUNCTIONAL CLINTON PRESIDENCY
(DECONSTRUCTING CLINTON'S HOFSTRA SPEECH) -- part1: clinton's "Brinkley" Lie
AFTERWORD: ON CLINTON SMALLNESS
(BRINKLEY MISSES THE POINT)
PRESIDENTIAL FAILURE, 9/11 + KATRINA
Carpe Mañana: The (bill + hillary) clinton Terrorism Policy
('Can we kill 'em tomorrow?')
CHENEY: CALL THEM REPREHENSIBLE
THE DEMOCRATS ARE GONNA GET US KILLED (kerry, clinton + sandy berger's pants) SERlES5
sandy berger haberdashery feint
(the specs, not the pants or the socks)
CLINTON TREASON + THE GORELICK WALL
Reverse Gorelick
THE LEFT'S RECKLESS TET-OFFENSIVE-GAMBIT REPLAY:
the left's jihad against America is killing our troops, aiding + abetting the terrorists and imperiling all Americans
CLINTON RAPES, REVISIONISM, USEFUL IDIOTS AND ENTROPY (an update)
pro-islamofascist-terrorist radical chic
WHY THE LEFT IS DANGEROUS FOR AMERICA
The Left's Fatally Flawed "Animal Farm" Mentality
(Why America Must NEVER AGAIN Elect a Democrat President)
WAR AND TREASON AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
(Please see post 65)
IN A 'PINCH': RETHINKING THE FIRST AMENDMENT
(Which came first, the 'journalist' or the traitor?)
PINCH SULZBERGER, PEARL HARBOR + TREASON
WHY WE MUST PROSECUTE THE NEW YORK TIMES
'MISBEGOTTEN' TIMES
(NARROWNESS, MR. SULZBERGER, NOT WIDTH)
WHY BIN LADEN WANTS HOME DELIVERY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
MORE
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THE ADDRESS |
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"In this interdependent world, we should still have a preference for peace over war....
But sometimes we would have these debates where people would say, if I didn't take some military action this very day, people would look down their nose at America and think we were weak. And I always thought of Senator Fulbright.... 6
So anytime somebody said in my presence, 'Hey, if you don't do this, people will think you're weak,' I always asked the same question for eight years, 'Can we kill 'em tomorrow?'
I don't think we can bring 'em back tomorrow, but can we kill 'em tomorrow? If we can kill them tomorrow, then we're not weak.... 1
I learned that as a 20-year-old kid watching Bill Fulbright. Listening."
bill clinton |
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in '91 and he went to the Sudan.
We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].
At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
bill clinton
"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'
I thought that my virtual obsession 2 with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him."
bill clinton
hillary clinton |
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Mia T |
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This legacy confab is in and of itself proof certain of clinton's deeply flawed character, and a demonstration in real time of the way in which the clinton years were about a legacy that was incidentally a presidency.
Madeleine Albright captured the essence of this dysfunctional presidency best when she explained why clinton couldn't go after bin Laden.
According to Richard Miniter, the Albright revelation occurred at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.
Albright explained that a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the 'accord' and the Peace Prize good-bye.
If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.
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bill clinton's Convenient Postmodern Pose:
"G-word"shame presages "W-word" horror
by Mia T, 4.6.04
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This month marks 10 years since the advent of the Rwandan genocide, a cruel, violent and well-organized rampage that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and the total disruption of Rwandan society. Over the past decade, scholars and advocates have rightly reflected on the reasons that the international community and nations in Africa must share the responsibility for this tragedy. As I said during my trip to Rwanda in 1998, "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."3
bill clinton
Learn From Rwanda
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 6, 2004; Page A21- Note: clinton's use of "we" is consistent with his "buck stops there/everywhere but not here" policy.
Bill Clinton felt their pain. Retrospectively. In 1998, on his Grand Apology Tour of Africa, a whirlwind tour of whirlwind apologies for slavery, the Cold War, you name it, he touched down in Kigali and apologized for the Rwandan genocide. "When you look at those children who greeted us," he said, biting his lip, as is his wont, "how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?"
Alas, the President had precisely identified the problem. In April 1994, when the Hutu genocidaires looked at the children who greeted them in the Tutsi villages, that's exactly what they thought: they didn't want those Tutsi children to have a chance to have their own children. So the question is: when a bunch of killers refuse to subscribe to multiculti mumbo-jumbo, what do you do?
"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices," continued Bill in his apology aria, "who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
Au contraire, he appreciated it all too fully. That's why, during the bloodbath,
Documents made public last week confirm that US officials knew within the first few days that a "final solution" to eliminate all Tutsis was underway.Clinton Administration officials were specifically instructed not to use the word "genocide" lest it provoke public pressure to do something.
SteynOnAmerica
CLINTON, CLARKE AND RWANDA: TEN YEARS ON
n the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.
A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.....In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.
This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.
With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts--thousands of Rwandans were dying every day--that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"--the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.
Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate....whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices.
Samantha Power
Bystanders to Genocide
Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
The Atlantic Online
- The Real Danger of a Fake President:
- Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo President
- Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo President
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by Mia T, 1.06.02
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Richard Gere stunned fellow liberals Monday by suggesting that President Bush is doing a better job of fighting AIDS than President Bill Clinton did.
Introduced by Sharon Stone at a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the "Chicago" star hailed Bush for his State of the Union proposal to contribute $15 billion toward the AIDS battle in Africa and the Caribbean. Gere then addressed the track record of Bush's predecessor in the White House.
"I'm sorry, Sen. [Hillary] Clinton, but your husband did nothing about AIDS for eight years," Gere said.
- In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled -- giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.
They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".
Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.
Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected...
- Just look around this chamber. We have members from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And America is stronger for it. But as we have seen, these differences all too often spark hatred and division, even here at home. . . This is not the American way. We must draw the line. Without delay, we must pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.
bill clinton, State of Union Speech, January 27, 2000
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- "I'm sorry, but the president is one of the crudest men I have ever encountered in government service," says one female agent. "He has no respect for women."
Among the comments clinton made in presence of Secret Service agents:
- "I'm sorry, but the president is one of the crudest men I have ever encountered in government service," says one female agent. "He has no respect for women."
- . Frequent speculation on the oral sex skills of women the president saw or met in receiving lines;
- . References to the size of a woman's breasts, legs or figure;
- . Sexual jokes.
- . References to the size of a woman's breasts, legs or figure;
- "It depends on who Ken Starr calls," says one ex-agent. "The people who are on the job today are not necessarily the ones who know the most."
Turnover In clinton's Secret Service Detail 'Highest That Anyone Can Remember'
After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, however, clinton toned down his rhetoric and behavior in front of his Secret Service agents, but those who guarded the president say enough of them saw and heard things which could be damaging to clinton.
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- In the months that follow, reporters drop the issue. Feminists say little or nothing. Rape crisis center workers acknowledge that Broaddrick's case, including her reluctance to come forward, is typical of victims of sexual assault. But they decline to speak against clinton. Some cite the federal funding they receive as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into law by clinton.
Why does the press continue to ignore the Juanita Broaddrick story?
- In the months that follow, reporters drop the issue. Feminists say little or nothing. Rape crisis center workers acknowledge that Broaddrick's case, including her reluctance to come forward, is typical of victims of sexual assault. But they decline to speak against clinton. Some cite the federal funding they receive as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into law by clinton.
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- The Placebo President:
- How a Rapist can be a Policy Feminist
- The Placebo President:
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- placebo effect n.
- A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.
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- Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.- Sylvia Plath
- A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.
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"There are only two years left. What harm can he do?": Sen. Dale Bumpers
September 11 changed a lot of things for me, Bill [O'Reilly]. I will say this, before September 11, I was definitely mildly myopic in terms of my political agenda. If you were Democrat you were probably right, and if you were a Republican you were probably wrong. Everything changed for me that day...My entire worldview changed. If you would have told me September 9 that I would have been at the world series game filming George Bush throwing out the first pitch with my 6-year-old son crying, I never would have believed you, but I was. Because my whole worldview changed.
WAR AND TREASON AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Mia T, December 29, 2005COPYRIGHT MIA T 2006
he placebo effect immediately came to mind as I listened to Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, debunk the following pernicious spin intended to save clinton.To wit: A proven felon and utter reprobate can remain president; clinton can be a failed human being but a good president.
The error in these statements arises, says Steele, from the belief that virtuousness is separate from personal responsibility so that one's virtuousness as an individual is determined by one's political positions on issues rather than on whether or not in one's personal life there is a consistency and a responsibility.
Steele's contention is that this compartmentalization, rather than being the amazing advantage the clintons would have us believe, in fact, spills toxicity into, corrupts, the culture.
If mere identification with good policies is what makes one virtuous then those policies become, what Steele calls, iconographic, that is to say they just represent virtuousness. They don't necessarily do virtuous things.
If clinton's semantic parsing strips meaning from our words, clinton's iconographic policies strip meaning from our society, systematically deconstructing our society as a democracy. . .
I would take Shelby Steele's thesis one step further. I maintain that iconographic policy functions like a placebo, producing a real, physiological and social effects.
The placebo effect is, after all, the brain's triumph over reality. Expectation alone can produce powerful physiological results. The placebo effect was, at one time, an evolutionary advantage: act now, think later
bill clinton is the paradigmatic Placebo President. Placebo is Latin for "I shall please." And please he does doling out sham treatments, iconographs, with abandon. To please, to placate, to numb, to deflect. Ultimately to showcase his imagined virtue. Or to confute his genuine vice.
clinton will dispense sugar pills (or bombs) at the drop of a high-heeled shoe... or at the hint of high treason...
clinton's charlatanry mimics that of primitive medicine. Through the 1940s, doctors had little effective medicine to offer so they deliberately attempted to induce the placebo response.
The efficaciousness of today's medicines does not diminish the power of the placebo. A recent review of placebo-controlled studies found that placebos and genuine treatments are often equally effective. If you expect to get better, you will.
Which brings me back to the original question: Can clinton be a failed human being but a good president?
Clearly he cannot. These two propositions are mutually exclusive. clinton's fundamental failure is a complete lack of integrity. He has violated his covenant with the American people.
Because clinton has destroyed his moral authority as a leader, he can no longer function even as a quack; the placebo effect is gone.
And so the Placebo President must now go, too.
COPYRIGHT MIA T 2006
