Chris Matthews: Clinton never had shot at greatness/never got opportunity Bush was given Tuesday

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 09/13/2001 | Chris Matthews

[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."

 

[discostu]

"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."

I sprayed my screen on this one. Having given a gem like that he better live up to it. There's plenty of people in the press that will be more than happy to point out everytime he hits a camel's butt.

[WIMom]

Well said! Bravo!

[The Grim Freeper]

He had a chance when a terrorist missile hit TWA 800. However, because he wanted a Nobel Peace Prize, he said he didn't want to have to handle the problem while on his watch. Some guy was on KSFO yesterday afternoon (on Babe in the Bunker's show), and was telling all about it and how George Stepinawfulstuff let the cat out of the bag recently, as well as someone else in Clinton's administration (can't remember the name). He also went on to detail how Gore got payoffs from the airlines (Delta, American, etc) in large amounts ($40K, $50K) immediately following his announcement that TWA 800 explosion was caused by faulty fuel tank.

I am relaying this second hand, so, if someone else heard this broadcast, please provide detail.

[Ole Okie]

What a clueless, sh!t-for-brains, typical @sshole thing to say. Allow me to paraphase: "I wish I could have gotten credit for ending World War II". If he'd been there, we probably would have lost.

Yeah, Sick Willie Clitoon would have fired a captured V1 rocket at a camel's butt and surrendered.

[Ann Archy]

You could have easily stopped with the quote by Bill Boy....that he would have liked to be President durig WWII, and that he was a man out of his time"...

Your posts are interesting...can you break them up o different threads so they aren't so long and more people could have the opportunity to read them?? Just a thught.

[Benrand]

That is the typical boome response..."I'm so much better that I just deserve to have achievement handed to me, no matter what the circumstance."

It's tacit admittal of how bad he is and how he could never see good in being President, other than just self-aggrandizing nothingness. So self-consumed.

[Syncro]

Yes Steve, he relly make tht comment and yes right in front of Hilliary!

Good info as usually Mia...Thanks

[TheGoodDoc]

Chris Matthews is one of the great figures in astrophysics.

The man is truly from outer space.

For eight long years, Clinton did nothing while Osama bin Ladin mass murdered Americans time after time, beginning with his first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Plenty of opportunity for "greatness."

Buttboy Matthews fails to understand that Bush would sacrifice his "greatness" in an instant, if he could save all those lives. Human excrement Clinton and his DNC apologists are upset that they are missing all the great photo-ops.

[Robert A Cook PE]

I disagree....though the graphics (perhaps) aren't "entrancing" - the combination of MANY different smaller quotes IS entrancing, and could NOT be done without the effort to pull it together.

Sooooooo. These people are NEVER going to "say everything" in one sentence, their supporters in the national press corpse AREN"T EVER going to put together these relationships and timelines into a single comprehensive package of condeming quotes ... like that of "minor" of China only signing the test ban treaty AFTER they got Lee's "computer tapes" of the software needed to verify their nuclear weapons, the supercomputer needed to run it, and the assumptions and design facts from this newly unclassified data to avoid design failures.

(After all, if you can be sure you avoid your competitor's errors and false starts, your own products need MUCH, MUCH less "testing" ....)

So, treason? Yes, but their liberal supporters will never "want" to believe it.....until Lee gets her Berkeley campus heated with the (direct) application of nuclear power.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

Of course, you realize that this is a set up by Chris Matthews, don't you? He comes up with the proposition that Clinton never had a shot at greatness, never got the opportunity Bush was given. In Matthews' mind, Bush will blow his chance, and will not rise to greatness. It's all so predictable.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Gee, the Clinton clean-up crew is everywhere on TV this week. Has the Bush administration moved the technology sales oversight from the Commerce Dept. back to the Defense Dept. where it was pre-Clinton? Clinton's people neglect to mention the satellite and surveillance technology transfers to China. I'm sure we'll think back on Clinton's legacy many times in the following years. He may have to double his SS detail on U.S. soil.

[f.Christian]

You cut my favorite picture---Clinton Gothic...I was impeached to save the constitution---James/jane MadisonII.

Put it back!!

[Octar]

I enjoy your posts, Mia T. Thanks.

[Biblebelter]

You did an excellent job of culling this quote from the slobbering motor mouth of not ready for prime time media.

Mathews is a tease and a coward.

He is a tease because during the Clinton scandals,Mathews beat Clinton over the head with a pillow as if he was the kind of Democrat who takes a stand against criminality. This caused him to occasionally get in a cat fight with someone like Paul Begala but he never could condemn Clinton with anything more than the snide aside.

He is a coward not only because I suspect that his draft record would reveal that he is, but because any time firm military action is discussed, his dove or chicken credentials become manifest depending on what ever metaphor works best for you.

[Emily RN]

Mr. Clinton had a couple of chances. He just didn't recognize them. There was the first attempt at the WTC and the bombing of the USS Cole. For such a smart man looking for the opportunity of being a great leader... this might not have occurred if Clinton had been seriously looking for greatness instead of gratification.

[f.Christian]

bttt

[Mr. Bungle]

Once again, Chris Matthews shows his fixation on gamesmanship and the aesthetics of political portraits. The opening paragraph is sad testimony to Matthews' undaunted crusade to trivialize himself - with his sickening wistfulness for what Bill Clinton "might have been."

We've seen things like this from him before. It is stomach turning in its tasteless irrelevance.

[NixNatAVanG InDaBurgh]

Once again, Chris Matthews shows his fixation

He doesn't have McCain to slobber all over this time. I think the boy needs a real hero he can call his very own.

[Texbob]

Yes, he did have his chance at greatness when ask about getting Lewinski's in the oval office he lied and said No. So sexual preditor and Liar became his legacy.

[Dan Day]

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."

Translation: "I wish the US had gone through a big criss when I was in office, so I could have looked more Presidential."

The depths of Clinton's selfishness and craving for personal glory never ceases to amaze me.