01-08-02

by Mia T

ASHINGTON, Jan. 8-- James Galbraith, a Keynesian like his famous father, John Kenneth, a self-professed lifelong Democrat and a professor of economics at the LBJ School of Public Policy at the University of Texas, proclaimed on Washington Journal (C-SPAN) today that clinton economic policy "would not sustain growth and prosperity indefinitely...we are seeing its end right now."

Professor Galbraith explained that the clinton scheme "depended on the private sector willing to borrow and spend." He added that the clinton period "created the unrealistic expectation" that the debt could be reduced to zero in 13 years.

If we take Galbraith's comments to their logical conclusion, then, oxymoronically, the "it's the economy, stupid" clinton scheme will be remembered for engineering not a weak economy but a weak presidency. History will record that clinton economic policy decisions, like all clinton policy decisions, were short-range and egocentric, that is, were based solely on their projected immediate effect on bill and/or hillary clinton. The "it's the economy, stupid" clinton scheme was engineered specifically to render a unqualified candidate viable, a depraved president tolerable, a president's successor feckless, and, finally, an ex-president (or his wife) craved.

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president.*

---GEORGE WILL, Sleaze, the sequel

Had George Will written Sleaze, the sequel (the "sequel" is, of course, hillary) after 9-11-01, I suspect that he would have had to forgo the above conceit, as the doubt expressed in the setup phrase was, from that day forward, no longer operational.

Indeed, assessing the clinton presidency an abject failure is not inconsistent with commentary coming from the left, most recently the LA Times: "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize."

When the clintons left office, I predicted that the country would eventually learn--sadly, the hard way--that this depraved, self-absorbed and inept pair had placed America (and the world) in mortal danger. But I was thinking years, not months.

It is very significant that hillary clinton didn't deny clinton culpability for the terrorism. (Meet the Press, 12-09-01), notwithstanding tired tactics (if you can't pass the buck, spread the blame) and chronic "KnowNothing Victim Clinton" self-exclusion.

If leftist pandering keeps the disenfranchized down in perpetuity, clinton pandering,("it's the economy, stupid"), kept the middle and upper classes wilfully ignorant for eight years.

And ironically, both results (leftist social policy and the clinton economy) are equally illusory, fraudulent. It is becoming increasingly clear that clinton covertly cooked the books even as he assiduously avoided essential actions that would have negatively impacted the economy--the ultimate source of his continued power--actions like, say, going after the terrorists.

It is critically important that hillary clinton fail in her grasp for power; read Peggy Noonan's little book, 'The Case Against Hillary Clinton' and Barbara Olson's two books; it is critical that the West de-clintonize, but that will be automatic once it is understood that the clintons risked civilization itself in order to gain and retain power.

It shouldn't take books, however, to see that a leader is a dangerous, self-absorbed sicko. People should be able to figure that out for themselves. The electorate must be taught to think, to reason. It must be able to spot spin, especially in this age of the electronic demagogue.

I am not hopeful. As Bertrand Russell noted, "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. "

Mia T, hillary clinton blames hubby for terrorism

(SHE knew nuttin')

Meet the Press, 12-09-01

*George Will continues: There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip), and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and that. ... Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he, perhaps even more so, incarnates Clintonism

Q ERTY3 co-rapist bump!

Hillary In 2004

"What the hell is this moribund loser doing in the
political arena, anyway?"
Q ERTY8
BUMP!

Thou art arm'd that hath thy crook'd schemers straight.
Cudgel thy brains no more, the clinton plots are great.: Mia T, On Neutered and Neutering,; by Mia T and Edward Zehr (EZ)

Q ERTY3

HILLARY, YOU KNOW

YOO-HOO Mrs. clinton: THE CLINTON RAPES ARE "UNBECOMING"

BUMP!!

A "Progressive Review" (Hillary's Greatest Hits?)

This is why the witch is speaking out.

B U M P!!!

make that 'NICKLES.'

Good work Mia T. I always enjoy it. :>)

Had Nichols been Senate Majority Leader during the postmodern Oz called clinton, the Senate would have removed the co-rapist utter failures from office, which may have been in time to thwart both the CLINTON recession and the CLINTON debacle incarnate: 9/11.

Absolutely correct. Nickles would have permitted the additional witnesses and evidence to be presented at the Senate trial that would have made a conviction of the Evil One likely if not a done deal. Lott on the other hand did his best to protect his buddy, Bill Clinton from conviction and removal from office. I was really saddened when Nickles announced that he would not challenge Lott after all. We need a Senate Majority Leader with the courage of his conservative convictions and Lott doesn't have it. It is time for him to go.

Good morning Mia & Bttt

Please Mia T...

I would like to read your posts, but I can't...They take too long to load. Please consider reducing your use of graphics. They seem to be the same thing in every post anyway.

Loved the graphic of clinton playing the sax while the WTC's burned.

Thank you.

Did you know that you can reset your browser preferences so that graphics don't open automatically? This setting is especially useful for those without a fast connection.

To everything you say about the Clintons I say; so what?
We know that huge numbers of Americans voted for Bill Clinton in '96 for only one reason; they were doing well financially.
In '08 when Hillary makes her run (she won't challenge GW in '04), if the economy is tanking those same Americans will vote her into the presidency.
Never underestimate the indifference to everything but the state of their own pocketbook, in which most people live.

"Mrs. CLINTON. I appreciate the Senator's factual intervention.

That statement, taken from post transcript on the "see Hillary yell at Nickles" thread, is priceless and quite revealing .

Any time a democrat is engaged, be prepared for "factual intervention" to be required. lol, except it's so true. This fits right in w/Ann Coulter's Slander, excellent footnoted book. Thanks, Mia, for your work.

Ever notice how when Demo'RATS win without a majority, it's labelled a "MANDATE", but if a conservative is elected by majority to landslide, it's labeled as the result of the voters being too swayed by enormous campaign budgets and the people being attracted to entertainment.

So howcome the entertainment industry is so liberal, if voting for conservatives is based upon entertainment. Maybe the RATS just don't get it. The people voted with their minds and if the liberals don't like it, please vote with their feet.

I predict that by '08, clinton won't be a viable option. Do not underestimate the magnitude and intensity of clinton revulsion WITHIN the Democrat party, especially after the Democrat Debacle of '02. (The Democrats lost EVERYTHING under the clintons.)

Notwithstanding this, 9/11 changed the paradigm. For the people--from 9/11 forward--clinton fecklessness and self-protection in the face of terror will always trump the pocketbook.

The people's reasoning, which is quite unassailable, goes something like this: If you ain't alive, you can't spend it.

Did you know that you can reset your browser preferences so that graphics don't open automatically? This setting is especially useful for those without a fast connection.

I don't want to set my computer like that...I enjoy seeing all the graphics on Free Republic. Just not yours because they seem to be the only ones that give me trouble...Locking me up at times.

Thus my request.

WSJ Opinion Journal
While Clinton Fiddled

A story of fecklessness in the face of terror.

BY DICK MORRIS
Tuesday, February 5, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
As the elections of 1996 loomed, a sense of crisis pervaded America. We seemed under attack from all directions by terrorists, foreign and domestic. A bomb exploded amid the Summer Olympic Games. TWA flight 800 vaporized over the Atlantic and many suspected terror. Nineteen American soldiers died and hundreds were wounded as a bomb ripped through their barracks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A year before, the federal office building in Oklahoma City was destroyed, killing hundreds more. In 1993, a bomb ripped through the World Trade Center hospitalizing a thousand people and killing six.
At the White House, we held hurried meetings as we watched with worry the growth of terrorism. We polled and speculated about its possible impact on President Clinton's re-election only a few months later.
Some of the president's staff and his consultants pressed the case for aggressive action to contain terror at home and attack it abroad. But at the center of the storm, Bill Clinton sat with an unusual imperturbability. Even as he fretted about whether to sign the welfare reform act and brooded about the FBI file, Paula Jones and Whitewater scandals, he seemed curiously uninvolved in the battle against terror.
Advised that his place in history rested on eliminating the deficit, making welfare reform work, and smashing the international network of terrorists militarily and economically, he remained unusually passive. Around him, his foreign-policy advisers--particularly former trade lawyer Sandy Berger, then serving as deputy national security adviser--seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror.
When Sen. Alfonse D'Amato pushed through legislation that sought to cripple the Iranian funding of terrorism by mandating U.S. retaliation against foreign or American companies that aided its oil industry, Mr. Berger advised a veto unless the bill were amended to allow the president to waive the sanctions. When the bill passed--with the waiver--Mr. Berger successfully blocked the implementation of sanctions in virtually every case.
When Mr. Clinton was advised to pass a law requiring that driver's licenses for aliens expire when their visas do (so that a routine traffic stop could trigger the deportation process), Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and White House adviser George Stephanopoulos worked hard to kill the idea. They derided the proposal, which called for the interface of FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service data about illegal aliens, visa expirations and terrorist watch lists with state motor vehicle records, as racial profiling and warned that it might alienate Mr. Clinton's political base. Had the idea been adopted, suicide bomber Mohamed Atta would have been subject to deportation when he was stopped for driving without a license, three months before Sept. 11, 2001.
President Clinton refused to adopt proposals that he establish a "president's list" of seemingly charitable groups that were really fund-raising fronts for terrorists, to warn Americans to stay away. Despite evidence from a 1993 FBI wiretap that the Homeland Foundation was raising money for the terrorist group Hamas, Mr. Clinton did not seize its assets, and the group functioned until President Bush closed it down.
Despite staff and consultant recommendations that he require baggage X-ray screening, federalization of air security checkpoints, and restoration of air marshals to commercial flights, Mr. Clinton did nothing to implement any of these proposals. Vice President Al Gore also failed to embrace them when his Commission on Air Safety made its recommendations in 1997. It required Sept. 11 to get these common-sense initiatives adopted.
After the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, President Clinton never visited the site and only alluded to it once in his regular Saturday radio address right after the bombing. Visiting New Jersey shortly after the attack, he urged Americans not to "overreact."
After the 1993 bombing--the first attack by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil--Mr. Clinton never met privately with the head of the CIA for the ensuing two years! Because of this lack of presidential focus, the investigation proceeded so slowly that we did not know of Osama bin Laden's involvement until 1996. As a result, the U.S. turned down Sudan's offer to give us the terrorist mastermind on a silver platter because we said that we lacked evidence on which to hold him.
Even when the Saudis stonewalled our investigation of the Riyadh bombing and handicapped the FBI by beheading those it suspected of involvement without permitting their interrogation, Mr. Clinton never criticized the kingdom publicly or, in my presence, privately.
When advisers proposed an oil embargo against Iran, the president did nothing, despite evidence that the Riyadh bombers had Iranian backing. At the time, Iran's daily oil production of three million barrels could have been offset by an expected increase of 1.5 million barrels in world-wide production (which proved conservative). In addition, the Saudis repeatedly and publicly indicated their commitment to "price stability," signaling their willingness to increase production to help fill the shortfall and avoid a price runup.
Republicans deserve their share of the blame as well. After the Oklahoma City attack, President Clinton made an eminently sensible, if somewhat limited, set of recommendations to the GOP-dominated Congress. But, because the Oklahoma City terrorists were right-wing extremists, Republicans looked askance at reasonable ideas like permitting roving wiretaps on terror suspects--subsequently adopted when Mr. Bush proposed it--and attaching tagents to identify the origin of explosives.
The real question, however, is why Mr. Clinton was so tentative in the war on terror. Everything else seemed to come first. He wouldn't toughen immigration enforcement because he feared a backlash from his political base. He waived sanctions against companies doing business with Iran because he worried about European reaction. There was no effort to cut off the flow of money to terror fronts because Janet Reno raised civil libertarian concerns. (Mr. Clinton did freeze the Hamas assets, but since they didn't maintain accounts in their own name, it netted no money.)
Bill Clinton revealed himself as a man of the 20th century while Mr. Bush has understood that Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era. In Bill Clinton's epoch, terror was primarily a criminal justice problem which must not be allowed to get in the way of the "real" foreign-policy issues--relations with Russia and China and the dynamics of the Western alliance. Indeed, if Mr. Clinton had any personal stamp on foreign policy, it was the subordination of military and security issues to economic concerns.
Terrorists fit into the scheme about the same way drug traffickers did--they were deplored, to be sure, and, where possible without undue inconvenience or loss of life, even attacked. But they hardly occupied center stage in our foreign policy.
Now, we all know better.
Mr. Morris, a Fox News political commentator, was an adviser to President Clinton.

Wall Street Journal

THE BILL'S COMING DUE

Clinton's Legacy
He didn't do enough to stop terrorists.

BY RUSH LIMBAUGH
Thursday, October 4, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since the Sept. 11 massacre, there have been numerous press reports
about Bill Clinton's attendance at funerals, visits to the rescue site,
and his other activities as a former president. What the media have
largely overlooked is the extent to which Mr. Clinton can be held
culpable for not doing enough when he was commander in chief to combat
the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and
Pentagon. If we're serious about avoiding past mistakes and improving
national security, we can't duck some serious questions about Mr.
Clinton's presidency.

Osama bin Laden already had the blood of Americans on his hands before
Sept. 11. He was reportedly behind the World Trade Center bombing that
killed six; the killing of 19 soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Saudi
Arabia; the bombings of the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which
killed 226 people, including 12 Americans; and the attack on the USS
Cole at Aden, Yemen, killing 17 seamen.

Mr. Clinton and his former national security adviser, Sandy Berger,
said after Sept. 11 that they had come within an hour of killing bin
Laden when they launched cruise missiles against his camps in 1998.
(Mr.
Clinton also ordered the destruction of a pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan.) Many saw this attack as a diversion from domestic
embarrassments, because it took place only three days after his grand
jury testimony in the Paula Jones case. On Sept. 24, National Review
Online published a report by Byron York that added considerable weight
to this last charge.

Mr. York spoke recently to retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been
U.S. commander in the region. Although he supported the cruise missile
attack, the general revealed it was a "million-to-one-shot." "There was
a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there. . . . My
intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that." His
recollection is a far cry from the version of Messrs. Clinton and
Berger. Which is accurate?

On Sept. 13, the Associated Press disclosed that "in the waning days of
the Clinton presidency, senior officials received specific intelligence
about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and weighed a military plan to
strike the suspected terrorist mastermind's location. The
administration opted against an attack." The possible attack was
discussed at a meeting last December, which was prompted by "eyes-only
intelligence" about bin Laden's location. A military strike option was
presented at the meeting. There was debate about whether the
intelligence was reliable. In the end, the president decided against
it.

The day after AP's story, Hillary Clinton gave a different explanation
of events to CNN. She said that in the last days of her husband's
administration, he planned to kill bin Laden, but that his location
couldn't be pinpointed: "It was human assets, that is, people on the
ground, who provided the information. My memory is that those assets
proved unreliable and were not able to form the basis of the plan that
we were considering launching."

Exactly what "eyes-on intelligence" was provided to Mr. Clinton in
December? And just how reliable did the information have to be to merit
a military strike? When Mr. Clinton ordered an attack on bin Laden's
camps in August 1998, Gen. Zinni said that it was a "million-to-one
shot."

A partial answer can be found in a Sept. 27 report by Jane's
Intelligence Digest, whose sources "suggested that previous plans to
capture or kill [bin Laden], which were supported by Moscow, had been
shelved by the previous U.S. administration on the grounds that they
might end in humiliating failure and loss of U.S. service personnel."
As a Jane's source put it: "Before the latest catastrophe there was a
distinct lack of political will to resolve the bin Laden problem and
this had a negative impact on wider intelligence operations."

Jane's claimed that the fundamental failure to deal with al Qaeda was
due "to a political reluctance to take decisive action during the
Clinton era, mainly because of a fear that it might derail the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was "combined with a general
complacency in Washington towards warnings that the U.S. itself (as
opposed to U.S.
facilities and personnel abroad) might be targeted."

President Bush is now leading a world-wide war against terrorism,
focused presently on bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their Taliban sponsors.
It has been widely noted that the U.S. is handicapped in this war by a
lack of good "Humint"--human intelligence--about the terrorists. Here
again the Clinton administration is culpable.

In 1995 CIA Director John Deutsch imposed complex guidelines that made
it more difficult to recruit informants who had committed human-rights
violations. Therefore, while the Justice Department has been able to
use former mobsters to get mobsters (e.g. Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, who
killed 19, was the government's key witness against John Gotti), the CIA
has been discouraged from recruiting former terrorists to get
terrorists. This has made infiltrating groups like al Qaeda virtually
impossible.

We have no choice but to address the policies and decisions, made at the
very highest level of our government, which helped bring us to this
point. To do otherwise is to be irresponsible and unprepared in the
face of a ruthless enemy, whose objective is to kill many more
Americans.

Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

Andrew Sullivan: The damage Clinton did

...The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face and, if the errors are to be rectified, it is essential to acknowledge what went wrong.
Two questions come to mind: how was it that the Osama Bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly, for good reasons.
There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness that Tuesday is already slowing the capacity to bring Bin Laden to justice by constricting military and diplomatic options. And with a president just a few months in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus.
Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries...ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?
The most plausible answer is that nobody has been fired because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in America's security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Bin Laden already attacked American embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been completely frank about his war. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Same guy, same building. ...
The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the clueless, stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all, former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter.
Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks."It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.

Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden...
If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible, in part, for what happened. More than 6,000 families are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the protection of its own citizens.
When a senior Clinton official can say of his own leader that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory", and when this administration is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting...
We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen, in retrospect, as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction.
But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble that the administration did little to prevent.
The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves - they meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on.
We were warned. But we were coasting. And the main person primarily entrusted with correcting that delusion, with ensuring America's national security - the president - was part of the problem.
Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that is Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker with each passing day.

Clinton's Failure to Confront Iraq
Allan J. Favish

Iraqi Complicity in the World Trade Center Bombing and
Beyond by Laurie Mylroie, which was published in June of this year and discusses the 1993 bombing of the WTC.

She explains how Bill Clinton intentionally failed to confront Iraq over its complicity in the bombing and other attacks.

She supported Clinton in 1992 having been an advisor on Iraq policy to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, as you can see at
http://admissions.geneseo.edu/cgi-bin/nrap?Roemer98.html

Her September 13, 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal on the recent attack is at
http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001120

In a live interview on Los Angeles radio station KPFK, broadcast around noon today, PST, she stated that Clinton lied about more than sex; he lied about national security.

I wish somebody would ask her about whether she thinks the Clinton administration covered up Iraqi involvement in the murder of those aboard TWA 800 and ordered the military not to pursue the attackers.

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?]

Q ERTY6 _{utter failure}
\
_{rodham-clinton} ^{reality-check}

BUMP!

You would be able to see any graphics YOU prefer by clicking on it. But. of course, it is your choice.

Hillary In 2004

A "Progressive Review" (Hillary's Greatest Hits?)

While Clinton Fiddled

A story of fecklessness in the face of terror.