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Chris Matthews: Clinton never had shot at greatness/never got opportunity Bush was given Tuesday
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 09/13/2001 | Chris Matthews

Posted on 09/17/2001 12:09:20 PM PDT by Mia T

 Chris Matthews: "Bill Clinton never had his shot at greatness. . .
he never got the opportunity George W. Bush was given this Tuesday: the historic chance to lead."

Washington -- Lucky though he was, Bill Clinton never had his shot at greatness...he never got the opportunity George W. Bush was given this Tuesday: the historic chance to lead.

Chris Matthews: Bush's war

From Woodward's book, The Choice - p 65:

 
 
...Clinton held a secret strategy session in the White House with Hillary, Gore, Panetta, Ickes and several cabinet secretaries. clinton asked everybody to keep the discussion private. He said he wanted to recapture winning themes of his 1992 victory, with emphasis on the middle class and traditional party groups such as labor. But it was a mushy meeting, and because some details soon leaked to the media no more such large sessions were held.
 
 
As Clinton continured his search, he lamented that he could not see a big, clear task before him. Part of him yearned for an obvious call to action or even a crisis. He was looking for that extraordinary challenge which he could define and then rally people to the cause. He wanted to find that galvanizing moment.
 
 
"I would have preferred being president during World War II" he said one night in January 1995. "I'm a person out of my time."

 

Chris--

clinton failed to achieve "greatness" (or even garden-variety adequacy ) not because of an absence of "opportunities"--but rather because of an absence of guts and selflessness and honesty to take the "shot," and an absence of skill to make it in any case...

Bush: "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt."

Washington and the liberal media may be getting the message: George Bush is for real and he's no Mr. Nice Guy when it comes to war.

Even Newsweek's Howard Fineman, a liberal Bush-basher, has had to do a double take this week.

Writing in his column of an Oval office meeting with four U.S. Senators -- including Hillary Rodham -- Fineman described Bush "relaxed and in control."

Fineman, drawing a comparison with Winston Churchill's defiance during World War II, quoted the president as telling the Senators: "When I take action," he said, "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."

No doubt, Hillary must have shuddered when she heard that, a clear hit on her husband's eight years of appeasement with terrorists and their backers.

Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[ASIDE: Have you noticed that as of the morning of 9-11-01, hillary clinton's "best memory" informs her--and she is quick to inform us -- that she was not "co-president" after all?]

Ex-CIA director blasts China policy

Woolsey likens strategy to failed 'appeasement' before WWII

"It's a legitimate end-use," says a Clinton administration official, who asked not to be identified. "Weather forecasting in the United States uses very intensive computing."

'Precedent Shattering': Administration OKs Supercomputer Sale to China

ABCNEWS.com, Published: 12/02/99, Author: David Ruppe

 

NEW YORK--A NewsMax.com/Zogby International poll finds that two-thirds of Americans want Congress to consider a second round of impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for possibly swapping United States military secrets to China in exchange for campaign cash.
 
Americans overwhelmingly indicated they are seriously concerned that President Clinton may have authorized the sale and transfer of nuclear and ballistic missile technology to China. The national survey of 1,005 registered voters was conducted by NewsMax.com/Zogby last week...

Poll: Two-thirds of Americans Want New Impeachment Review

NewsMax.com

December 21, 1999

 

The Manchurian Candidate?
Or Being There?
 
by Mia T
 
 
The Republicans' latest talking point is that the breach of national security enabled by clinton-gore must be simple incompetence, that the concept that anyone in government would commit treason is too outrageous even to contemplate.
 
If the Republicans believe what they are saying, then they are morons.
If they don't believe what they are saying, then they are traitors.
 
Outrageousness is an essential element of clinton-gore corruption. The clinton (and gore) crimes -- perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, rape, murder -- and now treason -- are so outrageous that they allow clinton hacks to reasonably brand all clinton accusers clinton-hating neo-Nazi crazies.
 
Yet privately few clintonites would deny that bill clinton facilitated China espionage. Their only question: "Why?"
 
Some call clinton a quisling, a Manchurian Candidate, bought off in Little Rock by Riady and company decades ago (and much too cheaply, according to his Chinese benefactors), trading our national security for his political power. This argument is persuasive but incomplete; clinton, a certifiable megalomaniac, is driven ultimately by his solipsistic, messianic world view and by that which ultimately quashes all else -- his toxic legacy.
 
William J. Broad suggests (Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes, The New York Times, May 30, 1999) that clinton had another reason to empower China and disembowel America. Broad argues that clinton sought to disseminate our atomic secrets proactively in order to implement his counterintuitive, postmodern, quite inane epistemological theory, namely, that, contrary to currently held dogma, knowledge is not power after all -- that, indeed, quite the contrary is the case.
 
Broad writes in part:
 
Since 1993, officials say, the Energy Department's "openness initiative"
has released at least 178 categories of atom secrets. By contrast, the
1980s saw two such actions. The unveilings have included no details of
specific weapons, like the W-88, a compact design Chinese spies are
suspected of having stolen from the weapons lab at Los Alamos, N.M. But
they include a slew of general secrets.
 
Its overview of the disclosures, "Restricted Data Declassification
Decisions," dated January 1999 and more than 140 pages long, lists such
things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making
hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium
fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding
atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a
second).
 
No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It
took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.
 
The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness
would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms
and war. John Holum, who heads arms control at the State Department,
told Congress last year that the test ban "essentially eliminates" the
possibility of a renewed international race to develop new kinds of
nuclear arms.
 
And the devaluing of nuclear secrets, highlighted by the rush of atomic
declassifications, was seen as a prerequisite to the ban's achievement.
The symbolism alone was potent, officials say. Openness let them
advertise a dramatic new state of affairs where hidden actions were to
be kept to a minimum, replacing decades of secrecy and paranoia.
 
"The United States must stand as leader," O'Leary told a packed news
conference in December 1993 upon starting the process. "We are
declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the
department."
 
Critics, however, say the former secrets are extremely valuable to
foreign powers intent on making nuclear headway. Gaffney, the former
Reagan official, disparaged the giveaway as "dangling goodies in front
of people to get them to sign up into our arms-control agenda."
 
Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense
Council in Washington, a private group that has criticized the openness,
said the declassifications had swept away so many secrets that the
combination had laid bare the central mysteries.
 
"In terms of the phenomenology of nuclear weapons," Cochran said, "the
cat is out of the bag."
 
Even before the China scandal broke, experts outside the administration
faulted the openness as promoting the bomb's spread. Last year, a
bipartisan commission of nine military specialists led by former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the "extensive declassification" of
secrets had inadvertently aided the global spread of deadly weapons.
["inadvertently" ???!!!!]  
 
The ultimate brake on nuclear advances was to be the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, which clinton began to push for as soon as he took office in
1993, hailing it as the hardest-fought, longest-sought prize in the
history of arms control.
 
Broad would have us believe we are watching "Being There" and not "The Manchurian Candidate." His argument is superficially appealing as most reasonable people would conclude that it requires the simplemindedness of a Chauncy Gardener (in "Being There") to reason that instructing China and a motley assortment of terrorist nations on how to beef up their atom bombs and how not to omit the "key steps" when building hydrogen bombs would somehow blunt and not stimulate their appetites for bigger and better bombs and a higher position in the power food chain...(or, alternatively, to fail to understand that the underlying premise of MAD (mutually assured destruction) is the absense of madness.)
 
But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- clinton 's wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton 's campaigns, clinton 's pushing of the test ban treaty, clinton 's concomitant sale of supercomputers, and clinton 's noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another desensitizing clinton apologia by The New York Times.
 
But even if clinton is a thoroughgoing (albeit postmodern) fool, China-gate is still treason. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does"applies.
 
(The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or mens rea runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare.)
 
Calling his position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone" (if he must say so himself), clinton believed that if he could get China to sign it, he would go down in history as the savior of mankind. This was 11 August 1995.
 
According to James Risen and Jeff Gerth of The New York Times, "the legacy codes and the warhead data that goes with them" [-- apparently stolen from the Los Alamos weapons lab by scientist, Wen Ho Lee aided and abetted by bill clinton , hillary clinton , the late Ron Brown, Sandy Berger, Hazel O'Leary, Janet Reno, Eric Holder and others in the clinton administration (not to mention congressional clinton accomplices Glenn, Daschle, Bumpers, Harkin, Boxer, Feinstein, Lantos, Levin. Lautenberg, Torricelli et al.) --] "could be particularly valuable for a country, like China, that has signed onto the nuclear test ban treaty and relies solely on computer simulations to upgrade and maintain its nuclear arsenal [especially when combined with the supercomputers that clinton sold to China to help them finish the job]. The legacy codes are now used to maintain the American nuclear arsenal through computer simulation.
 
Most of Lee's transfers occurred in 1994 and 1995, just before China signed the test ban treaty in 1996, according to American officials."
 
Few who have observed clinton would argue against the proposition that this legacy-obsessed megalomaniac would trade our legacy codes for a rehabilitated legacy in a Monica minute and to hell with "the children."
 



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Front Page News; News/Current Events
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To: Mia T
When I read this article it set me off. Particularly when I heard Matthews criticizing remarks made by Bush yesterday. I won't hold back next time:

You mindless Idiot! How dare you say that Clinton was not "lucky" enough to achieve greatness. He is not nor would he have been great because he is morally bankrupt. The most narcissistic, self-absorbed and greediest President of our time does not have the internal fortitude to go to war. He was never respected as Commander-in-Chief by anyone in the military because they knew he was at best a sniveled-nosed coward, at worst a traitor to the United States for putting his political gain before our national interest.

It is still amazing to me that you and most of the media were so in love with this former President. I can truly say I don't get the infatuation.

Clinton was a phony, a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman - and I will agree he was great at that. For a decisive leader, a true Chief Executive, a respected and respectful Commander-in-Chief, give me President George W. Bush any day.

41 posted on 09/17/2001 1:03:56 PM PDT by gramho12
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To: Mia T
I have tried to resist politcizing, but you know that is what Clinton was thinking. As a matter of fact, I seem to recall a story years ago in which a Clinton staffer was lamenting the fact that Clinton had no crisis upon which to build a legacy.
42 posted on 09/17/2001 1:04:47 PM PDT by soccermom
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To: balrog666
Thanks -- that quote may have been what I was referencing.
43 posted on 09/17/2001 1:06:04 PM PDT by soccermom
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To: KC Burke
You're right - I forgot. Was just listing what came to mind immediately. I was also thinking about adding Waco/OKC.
44 posted on 09/17/2001 1:08:24 PM PDT by DuncanWaring
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To: Mia T
Clinton did have a chance for greatness. He was handed a post Cold War world that he messed up because of his own narrow selfish ambitions. His foreign policy was a total failure and only blackened the name of the US around the world. Let's face it, if the Europeans are praising you, you are doing something wrong. And I think it was intentional -- I mean, how much of this can really be ascribed to incompetance?

Just the thought of Clinton being in charge during a crisis like this creeps me out.

45 posted on 09/17/2001 1:20:44 PM PDT by ExiledinMD
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To: Mia T
Yeah, he coulda been a contender, but all he got was a one-way ticket to Palookaville. So sad.
46 posted on 09/17/2001 1:22:21 PM PDT by Clinton's a rapist
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To: Mia T
"Chris Matthews: Clinton never had shot at greatness/never got opportunity Bush was given Tuesday "

You can't make a silk purse from a pig's ear.

47 posted on 09/17/2001 1:23:30 PM PDT by Don Myers
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To: TheDon
"They had their chance. They have not lead. We will."

2000 Presidential Candidate
Gov. George W. Bush.


48 posted on 09/17/2001 1:24:30 PM PDT by newzjunkey
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To: Mia T
Did Bush actually make that comment about not shooting a $2 million dollar missile at an empty tent and hitting a camel in the butt?
49 posted on 09/17/2001 1:27:10 PM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: Mia T
When I recently saw Clinton, sticking that sorrowful lip out, I couldn't help but think that he was probably jealous of George W. Bush's 'luck' at having something such as this happen.
50 posted on 09/17/2001 1:27:46 PM PDT by FormerLib
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To: Nogbad
Who in the hell do you think you are?
Unless you are JimRob with a new handle, you have no business critiquing what gets posted here.
Buzz off.
51 posted on 09/17/2001 1:30:07 PM PDT by MamaLucci
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To: Mia T
Chris Matthews is a jerk. What kind of man would even think that this horrible incident would give anyone a chance to greatness. God put George W. Bush to be the man in charge. This is no accident and Chris Matthews needs to understand that. He's just another bitter liberal still wishing for a different election result.
52 posted on 09/17/2001 1:32:10 PM PDT by Lucky2
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Comment #53 Removed by Moderator

To: Mia T

T-SHIRTS</a href>

54 posted on 09/17/2001 1:33:14 PM PDT by JohnPaulJones
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Comment #55 Removed by Moderator

To: MamaLucci
"Who in the hell do you think you are?"

I think some critiques of postings are a bit stuffy (like criticizing for no paragraph breaks in a 10 sentence story), but all those graphics do tend to slow things down, so I agree with nogbad.
56 posted on 09/17/2001 1:35:34 PM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: Mia T
Mia here's a copy of the email I just sent this idiot enjoy!

"LUCKY THOUGH he was, Bill Clinton never had his shot at greatness........... But he never got the opportunity George W. Bush was given this Tuesday"

Dear Chris,

Are you loosing your mind...since when are the deaths of some 5000+ innocent people an OPPORTUNITY! What a completely pathetic statement and truly inconsiderate suggestion that THIS CARNAGE on 9-11-01 is an OPPORTUNITY. I've been listening to you rant for several days now...what a political hack you are! Would your viewpoint be different if one of your family members was buried in that rubble? Does your hatred run sooooo deep for the republicans that you've got blinders on? You wear your petty jealousy on your sleeve every time you open your mouth. Your problem as I see it is that you have no Modern day Democratic President during the last half of the Century which you can embrace as truly great. Oh, I know your first response would be Kennedy but you and I both know that politically he was in trouble. It was only because of his assassination that he was elevated to martyr status in the Democratic party.

So who else does that leave? Lyndon Johnson...nope. He had Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Jimmy Carter...NOT...he had 444 days of hostages in Iran..........So, hmmmmm., who does that leave? William Jefferson Clinton. Yeah, that's the one! But He was too busy sticking his DICK in an Interns mouth and getting caught while his wife was getting kissed by Suha Arafat and her husband who now appear to have been screwing our country over all along.

Yeah, he's the one you can hold up....as the greatest Democratic President of the last half of the 20th Century. While your at it why don't you just ask the Democratic party to change their symbol from a donkey to a Condom instead....I hear it gives you a false sense of security while your being screwed!

Regards from an American Citizen,

Lisa in Ohio

From the UNITED States of America

57 posted on 09/17/2001 1:36:20 PM PDT by thingumbob
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To: Mia T
Bump for a great post!
58 posted on 09/17/2001 1:37:37 PM PDT by Godebert
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To: Mia T
Oh, Willie took his "shots" alright.

Unfortunately for his sorry, miserable, spoiled-brat a$$, they were your textbook "Money Shots."

Unfortunately for him, Monica kept one of them -- on a blue dress </font color=red> -- as a momento of their -- er -- encounter. </font color=blue></font color=red>

59 posted on 09/17/2001 1:38:00 PM PDT by Dick Bachert
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To: Mia T
Greatness?? He couldn't even attain mediocrity.
60 posted on 09/17/2001 1:39:03 PM PDT by truthkeeper
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