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Who knew this was to become a ZOT thread?
Welcome to Free Republic, TheBridge.
Posted on 06/20/2007 11:12:04 PM PDT by Politicalmom
Barring the calamitous, former United States senator from Tennessee Fred Thompson will be the next president of the United States.
Thompson's masterful use of the online interview – a vastly smarter and cheaper way of campaigning for those with something to say – has all but secured him the Republican nomination.
In the general election, in a fair fight, either Obama or Hillary – or Gore for that matter–will have a hard time winning any five states against Thompson.
But for Hillary at least, it is too late in the game to fight fair. Desperation will push her and her soulless minions to fight otherwise. No fool, Thompson knows what he is up against.
In 1997, then-Sen. Thompson chaired a committee that investigated what he rightly called "the most corrupt political campaign in modern history." Hillary's fingerprints were all over that campaign.
Beginning early in 1995, the Clintons launched an unprecedented series of expensive, untruthful, arguably illegal TV ads. For cover, they laundered the campaign through the Democratic National Committee.
According to Clinton adviser Dick Morris, Hillary signed off on everything. The media, true to form, chose not to notice the ads or their financing. Here, the Thompson Committee report proves instructive:
The president and his aides demeaned the offices of the president and vice president, took advantage of minority groups, pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy-makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well. Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.
Johnny Chung, who admitted funneling $100,000 from the Chinese military to the DNC, would tell the Thompson Committee: "The White House is like a subway: You have to put in coins to open the gates."
No one understood this investment opportunity better than James and Moctar Riady, an ethnic Chinese father-and-son team who ran the powerful Indonesian firm the Lippo Group.
The Riadys had sensed Clinton's sleaze potential back in Arkansas and bailed out his 1992 primary campaign at it shakiest moment. As a quid pro quo, the Riadys sought a job for their "man in America," John Huang.
Aware of his many talents, the DNC put Huang on its "must consider" list. And what were Huang's talents? A letter sent by an Asian outreach advocate on the stationery of David Roberti, the president pro tem of the California state Senate, was frank to a fault.
"John is the Riady family's top priority for placement because he is like one of their own." The Riady family, in case anyone needed reminding, "invested heavily in the Clinton campaign."
Huang ended up in Ron Brown's Commerce Department as a deputy assistant secretary. Curiously, he got the job on the same day embattled Clinton aide Webster Hubbell got a $100,000 check from a Riady company, and Hubbell "rolled over" once more.
Brown confidante Nolanda Hill would tell ABC's "Prime Time Live," according to Brown, "the White House put [Huang] there," and in this instance, added Hill, "The White House meant Hillary Clinton."
Whoever was responsible, Huang went to Commerce not to advance America's interests but those of the Riadys and, by extension, those of China.
"Over the past five years," reads the Thompson report, "the Lippo Group has shifted its strategic center from Indonesia to the People's Republic of China." Those five years, by the way, backdated to 1992, the year of Clinton's election.
On one particularly revealing occasion, Huang left a CIA briefing at the Commerce Department and walked across the street where, according to the Thompson Committee, he had "a secret office."
This office was located within the larger offices of Stephens Inc., the Little Rock-based investment-banking firm with which the Riadys and the Clintons had a long relationship. There, in private, Huang proceeded to place a three-hour call to his former employer, the Lippo Group.
Lippo had a lot at stake. The CIA briefing concerned the development by an international consortium of a massive coal-fired power plant in Indonesia called the Paiton plant.
The Lippo Group just happened to control one of the only two commercially viable low-sulfur coal mines in the world, this one conveniently located near the Paiton plant.
At the Clintons' urging, Ron Brown helped put the Paiton deal together, and the various players thanked him profusely for his help. Among the players, as usual during these years, was the Enron Corporation.
What happens next on the American end of this saga raises a host of troubling questions. The CNN.com report on the day it happened, Sept. 18, 1996, well captures the general tenor of the reporting.
"Clinton Declares Utah Canyons A National Monument," reads the headline.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer reported that using the Grand Canyon as "his picture perfect backdrop," Clinton "unilaterally" declared a new 1.7 million-acre national monument 70 miles away in southern Utah.
"We're saying, very simply, our parents and grandparents saved the Grand Canyon for us," Clinton told the cheering crowd. "Today, we will save the Grand Escalante Canyons and the Kaiparowitz Plateaus of Utah for our children."
To his credit, Blitzer did not shy from the implicit controversy. He reported the people of Utah were "furious." They claimed it was "a land grab" by the federal government "at the economic expense of the state."
The rationale for the move puzzled Blitzer as Clinton already had the environmental vote, and there were many safer gestures he could have made with less than two months left in the campaign.
Blitzer raised the issue of coal, perhaps $1 trillion worth of clean, low-sulfur coal that would never be mined. Just the year before Utah had approved an environmental-friendly mining contract on the Kaiparowitz Plateau with Dutch-owned Andalex Resources.
Said Clinton of this grand environmental gesture, "We can't have mines everywhere, and we shouldn't have mines that threaten our national treasures."
No, not everywhere, just in Indonesia. In a stroke of the pen, Clinton had handed the Riadys a monopoly on the world's supply of low-sulfur coal.
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots between Utah and Indonesia. The FBI had made the connection as well. Consider the following field notes from an FBI interview with Huang:
Huang laughed in response to questions concerning j. riady's interest in Utah coal restrictions. j. riady's coal interests were minimal. Indonesia had significant infrastructure problems which prohibited the development of its coal resources.
Huang was lying. The Riadys had a powerful interest, and they would exploit it for all it was worth. In fact, at the Paiton plant, the price of the coal exceeded the price of the electricity produced.
In 1999, PLN, the state Indonesian power company, sued the Clinton administration. Its attorneys charged U.S. officials knew the Paiton power plant contract to be awash in "corruption, collusion and nepotism" from the beginning.
By this time, though, James Riady had fled the country, and Huang had pled the fifth.
Worse, Huang's immediate boss, Charles Meissner, and Meissner's boss, Ron Brown, had died in the "inexplicable" crash of an Air Force CT-43A on a Croatian hillside.
Yes, Fred, watch out for the calamitous.
Hillary and her “soulless minions”? I stopped reading right there. Objectivity out the window. Typical WND.
*CLICK*
I’m not a Rudy supporter either. I like Mitt and Fred.
Say, do you suppose the Clintons have access to any kryptonite???
I didn't know that a person had to announce 2 years in advance to run? You did have it partially right, A vote FOR Rudy is like a vote FOR Klintoon! Gun grabbing, gay loving NY lib. Gee do I choose Rudy or Hillary???
Is there an objective statement in there somewhere?
Cordially,
Tooty Fruity Rudy isn’t making it out of the primaries.
AMEN a thousand times.
Imagine that, strategery lost on a julie-annie supporter.
While I love re-reading the history, that committee was one of the key opportunities lost thanks in part to Fred not being able to bring it to its conclusion. Why? Because John Glenn, minority leader on the committee, frustrated the whole process. Why? Because Clinton had promised Glenn that he would cover long overdue campaign debts going back to 1984 and he would give John Glenn one last ride on the NASA Shuttle.
Fred was was too nice — as this article points out: the corruption was there for all to see but Fred didn’t have the b**** to press it.
I like Fred, but this was far from his best moment in the Senate.
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Who knew this was to become a ZOT thread?
Welcome to Free Republic, TheBridge.
Did I just hear a bug zapper click on?
}:-)4
He wasn't given the tools to press it, because Glenn blocked the necessary grants of immunity to key witnesses. In fact, the hearings were quite successful, as many of the key figures were eventually brought up on various charges, but the Democrats on the committee made sure the Clintons got off the hook.
If Thompson made a mistake, it was early on, based on his Watergate experience, in assuming that both parties would lay aside partisan differences in order to root out corruption in their ranks. He was unprepared for the "party over principle" attitude the Democrats developed in the 20 or so years between the events. I doubt he'll make that mistake again.
Anyone who hasn’t read Ann Coulter’s book “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” should do so as a refresher course to the crimes of selling of America by the Clinton administration during the 1990’s. The fact that so many still sit in Congress today, who are aware of the magnitude of these crimes and who have said and done nothing- spelled the beginning of the end of life as we knew it.
Aside from personally always being a bit suspect of World Nut Daily, I think this article is pretty much right.
No such animal as a fair fight, particularly with this generation of Dems.
We know all that stuff about the Clintons. None of this is any sort of secret. What makes anyone here think these facts, true and damning as they are, will get any traction? No one besides us even gives a hoot. Or for that matter, will they even be brought up by our side?
WND makes a good case on paper, but in the real world?
If you think that the Republican Party is JUST NOT LIBERAL ENOUGH,,,,
and to want to accelerate that movement much further to the LEFT,,,,
a liberal like JulieAnnie is JUST THE MAN FOR THE JOB!!
It's amazing how many 'so called' conservatives are willing to 'toss the conservative base and its traditional conservative values and principles' overboard to elect a liberal like JulieAnnie--in the name of the WOT.
It's even more outrageous and ludicruous to think (as many of them must do) that JulieAnnie is the only Republican who will aggressively fight the WOT. That is ridiculous--absolutely ridiculous.
Once again for good measure, liberal Republicans like JulieAnnie are MUCH MORE DANGEROUS than liberal democrats,,,
because liberal Republicans BLUR THE DISTINCTION between conservatism and liberalism,,,,
making LIBERALISM MUCH MOFE ACCEPTABLE!!
“Fred is very knowledgeable about the Clintons’ dealings with China.”, “the candidate with the most knowledge about the Clintons is Huckabee.” ............ Doesn’t knowing and not doing anything about it make it worthless? Clinton backers have tunnel vision and closed minds, it won’t phase them a bit. You can make all the allegations you want, the Clintons are untouchable. They’ll get a free pass or a light slap on the wrist. Besides you’ll never get the couch sitting, twinky eating, Jerry Springer - Maury watchers or Jay walking types to vote for anyone other than the Clintons.
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