Huge spin in ‘95 was the closing of the parks.
There wasn’t 20% under employment and 1.6 trillion deficits back then though.
Just how about Congress and the Prez cut all the pork they have tossed away and stop trying to terrorize the country into more spending?
MORE MEMORIES....
February 26, 2011
The Media’s Deadly Sin
By Carol Peracchio
Sixteen years ago, the Republican House of Representatives, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, passed a federal budget containing spending cuts and slowing of growth in some programs. President Bill Clinton vetoed it. This caused the federal government to shut down for several days until the Congress blinked and passed another budget more to the president’s liking.
The mainstream media, which at the time consisted of the broadcast news networks, newspapers, and CNN, reported nonstop on the brief stoppage of nonessential federal services. They described the temporary closing of national museums in tones that rivaled the death scene from Camille for over-the-top heart wrenching hysteria.
Last year I was listening to the radio and heard that our area had experienced an earthquake during the night. I took the reporter’s word that it happened; it had been so mild that I slept right through it. In December 1995, if one weren’t visiting a national park or applying for a passport, the government shutdown had the same impact as that earthquake. In other words, if it hadn’t been for the media caterwauling, the majority of us wouldn’t have even known the shutdown had happened.
That didn’t stop reporters from using the brief interruption in sleigh rides in Yellowstone Park as an opportunity to caricature Newt as the “Gingrich Who Stole Medicare” and “a car bomber who wants to blow the country up.” For sixteen long years we’ve heard ad nauseam that the government shutdown of 1995 was so horrendous that it cinched Bill Clinton’s reelection.