Newsmax Boss Says He Now Thinks Bill Clinton 'Was a Great President'

Newsbusters ^ | 9/28/09 | Tim Graham

[pissant]

Which statement here is weirder? Newsmax boss Christopher Ruddy now declaring that Bill Clinton was a "great president"? Or Clinton telling him he did a "good job" hounding him in the 1990s? Howard Kurtz unraveled this bizarre meeting of former adversaries in Monday’s Washington Post:

For those who remember Ruddy's name from the scandal wars of the 1990s, that is nothing short of remarkable. Ruddy wrote a book titled "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," questioning whether the Clinton aide, who committed suicide, had been murdered. He also questioned whether Commerce secretary Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash, had been shot in the head. And yet here was Ruddy, now chief executive of Newsmax.com, telling Clinton that "I was one of your critics" during his administration, and Clinton responding with a laugh: "You did a good job."

Ruddy says in an interview that he was "overzealous" and "over the top" when publisher Richard Mellon Scaife was financing his Clinton investigations. (Scaife has also made peace with his onetime nemesis.) "I think he was a much better president than I thought," Ruddy says. "I think he was a great president."

If this deep bow is what it takes to gain access for an interview with the former president, the price is too high. It sounds a lot like Joe Scarborough apologizing all over Hillary Clinton a few years back.

[Peter Horry]

“There’s something very wrong here. Either Ruddy is being completely misquoted in or he is raving mad.”

Or Clinton has the pictures, I suspect there’s a lot of that going around, with both the media and politicians.

[mono]

I miss the 1990s.......surpluses! Bush and the GOP Congress spent them. Obama and a Demo Congress buried them. Of course, there never were any real surpluses anyway.

[chimera]

No biggie. It all points to an increasingly “police state” mode of operation. I understand the context of the things done post 9/11 and generally don't have a problem with most of them, but this tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, from the FBI and ATF cowboys down to local S.W.A.T., drug busts, and cops on the beat, is really disturbing. The siege of Ruby Ridge typified that. The assassination sequence seems to be, kill the dog(s), kill the wives and kids, then kill the adult males. Disgusting.

[pgkdan]

Wasn’t so bad? How about 9-11? That wasn’t so bad either, was it? What about the Cole? Unless you were one of the 19 kids killed that wasn’t so bad either, was it?

[Moby Grape]

Missile technology to Red China for campaign cash...not so bad.

[pgkdan]

Not to mention that gem of a deal Clinton Albright and Carter made with North Korea. Not bad, eh?

[StolarStorm]

Those were bad, but Bush had his moments as well. Look, I don't like Clinton, I think he is evil. I'm just saying that as far as running the government, Bush was sucky as well.

He was in for 8 years, and none of the initiatives that we all should have seen came about, yet we got huge deficit spending, the medicare expansion, the banking disaster and many other examples of poor management.

The SEC under Bush was a toothless joke as well as the other regulatory bodies. Banks and hedge funds laughed at enforcement.... there was practically none. Cronies of the Wall Street firms were put in charge.

How can any conservative really not have been disappointed with Bush's administration???? We went backwards, not forwards. But at least he wasn't Gore, that would have been a horrible alternative.

[Reagan is King]

Obama may make even lowly Carter look like a good President before he’s through. Well, okay maybe up to “crummy President” from “worst President ever”? Carter was mostly just a dumb boob, Obama is a dangerous Marxist that seems to hate his own country. That’s a bad combination.

[Pikachu_Dad]

Hey, don’t knock it. Bill was a great President.

He had three of the top three accomplishments of any recent modern President.

#3) After only two years of hard work, he gave us the first Republican controlled Senate in TWELVE years.

#2) Again after only two years of hard work, he gave us the first Republican controlled House in FORTY years. Think about that - FORTY YEARS !!! That takes extreme skill.

#1) His greatest accomplishment took longer - it took 8 full years to achieve. But after much hard work, he finally managed to pull it off. He gave us President George Bush !

Now can you name any recent President with three finer accomplishments than these three?

Now that great President Jimmah Carter did give us 8 years of President Regan.

[supremedoctrine]

I always found Ruddy strangely lethargic in his aspect and almost prissy, though I liked his Vince Foster book a lot.
His NEWSMAX stewardship, though, has turned into a real joke, an irrelevancy, and by now is WAAAAAAYYYYYY behind the times, when it used to be a bit ahead of the times.
NEWSMAX seems to have become some kind of advertising machine which seems more interested in selling emergency radios rather than a source for news.

[what's up]

As the leader of the party Bush needed to lead congress to pass those bills

Helps to have the grassroots pushing Congress to make the huge reforms you're talking about.

That's the whole reason the Dems are having trouble getting health care passed...the grass roots is now vocal, active, and making their reasons known.

But under Bush? Where were the crowds at the townhalls? No where to be found. The grassroots sat back and wanted Bush to do the entire heavy lifting.

[Burlem]

I just tried to go to newsmax, unable to get there. message not configures, or asomething like that, also suggests if site manager to go “here” giving a different link.

[Burlem]

Newsmax is back, must have been a glitch