Posted on 12/22/2001 4:39:54 AM PST by Mia T
NEW YORK, Dec 21--Diehard clinton lackey, Lanny Davis tested the CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme in what the clintons likely regard their most difficult venue, "The O'Reilly Factor," The top-rated Fox News show demonstrated once again that its motto, "the no spin zone," is no spin. The eponymous host swiftly stopped the spin (and the spin). O'Reilly debunked all the shameless clinton-directed revisionism spewed by Davis, exposing the absurdity of the CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme even as he underscored clinton's immutable legacy of depravity and failure.
December 21, 2001
Clinton and Aides Lay Plans to Repair a Battered Image
By RICHARD L. BERKE
ASHINGTON, Dec. 20 -- Even after Bill Clinton was elected president, his campaigning never seemed to stop. In the White House, he was always keenly attentive to polls and political calculations and presided over what became known as a "permanent campaign." Now, Mr. Clinton is trying to extend the permanent campaign even beyond his presidency. Frustrated that his image has been battered since he left office, Mr. Clinton summoned several of his aides and advisers on Wednesday to devise ways to remind the public of his accomplishments and defend his legacy against criticism on matters including his role in the current recession and his failure to strike a fatal blow against Osama bin Laden or his terrorist network after the embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998. Participants in the session said Mr. Clinton was concerned that Democratic leaders had not sufficiently spoken up for his administration, especially his centrist policies on health care, welfare, crime and education. As part of the campaign to refurbish his image, Mr. Clinton wants to play a central role in setting an issue agenda for the Democrats and for the party's aspiring Congressional and presidential candidates, his advisers said. No modern president has ever mounted such an aggressive and organized drive to affect the agenda after leaving the White House. "It's important that the president's legacy not be squandered because his own people remain silent and scattered," said Bill Richardson, Mr. Clinton's energy secretary, who like many others took part through a telephone hookup. "It's important that the Democratic Party not turn away from Clinton's centrist legacy that brought us economic prosperity." Several participants said they did not want to discuss the meeting out of respect for Mr. Clinton's privacy. Others also acknowledged that they were worried that Mr. Clinton could be portrayed as preoccupied with his reputation and not conducting himself appropriately for a former president. "I feel very uncomfortable talking about these meetings," said Sandy Berger, Mr. Clinton's former national security adviser. "As far as I'm concerned, it was a private meeting, so I'm not going to say anything," said Al From, the executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council. Others, insisting they had nothing to hide, were not so reluctant. Rodney Slater, Mr. Clinton's transportation secretary, said an impetus for the meeting was to make sure that the former president's policies were still in the public discourse. "As much as anything, it was to recognize that we were part of something special," Mr. Slater said, "that there were still opportunities out there for us to express opinions about things and professional judgments." Douglas Sosnik, who was Mr. Clinton's political director and later one of his most senior aides, put it this way: "Under President Clinton's leadership, we accomplished a remarkable amount in the last eight years, and his friends feel we should be doing a better job of getting that out proactively. Since he left office, we've spent too much time on the defensive, reacting to stories." Gene Sperling, who was Mr. Clinton's top economic aide, said, "Most of the conversation was really about what kind of things he should be doing with his time, what his long- term service contributions should be." Julia Payne, Mr. Clinton's spokeswoman, said she would have no comment about "a private meeting." While Mr. Clinton had held meetings with advisers before, participants described this one as having a special urgency. Mr. Clinton dominated the session, which lasted nearly two hours, participants said. They said he was careful not to criticize President Bush. And they said that while he expressed concern that he was being blamed for not catching Osama bin Laden, most of the discussion was about how to raise his profile and press his case on domestic matters. Even during his presidency, Mr. Clinton was deeply interested in how he would be perceived by history. Now, the efforts to deploy surrogates to speak out for him are reminiscent of his vaunted war rooms in the White House, which were established for him to seize the political offensive on matters that included Whitewater and health care. "He basically said our legacy is being pummeled and we have to find ways to revive it," said one participant, who described it as if it were a meeting of the top lieutenants of a political campaign. "We concluded that the Clinton hard core were not on message, and we had to develop a center of gravity. We have to remind people of what we did on the economy, what we did with the crime bill, what we did with terrorism." He added, "They're trying to pin the bin Laden thing on us." Participants said that while some nice things were said about the Democratic leaders in Congress, Senator Tom Daschle and Representative Richard A. Gephardt, there was a view that they would only do so much to press the Clinton agenda. "The view was that House and Senate Democrats were too preoccupied with their own re-elections and their own deals," one participant said. Other participants included Maggie Williams, Mr. Clinton's current chief of staff; John D. Podesta, Mr. Clinton's former chief of staff; Bruce Lindsey, Mr. Clinton confidant; Eli J. Segal, the former head of Mr. Clinton's national service organization; Steve Richetti, who was a deputy chief of staff; Maria Echavesta, a former deputy chief of staff; and Cheryl Mills, a deputy White House counsel. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York did not take part, nor did former Vice President Al Gore or any of his advisers. Mr. Clinton's advisers said part of the discussion was over how active the former president should be in stumping for Democratic candidates next year. They said they had not reached a determination. "He does not want to appear to be upstaging Bush," said one participant. "But the alternative to that is to continue to see his legacy vanish. Clinton said he was getting more of a positive response about his legacy with younger people." Mr. Richardson, for one, said it was appropriate for Mr. Clinton to have a more public role. "I'm pleased that the president will be more active in ensuring his legacy," he said.
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The Covert Hunt for bin Laden By Barton Gellman
First of two articles BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH...clinton wanted to go after terrorists...BLAH BLAH... TO BE CONTINUED... |
The smartest woman in the world would relish "the raucous give and take of American democracy, " as Charles Kuralt once put it. hillary clinton, by contrast, subsists on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind... In her new book, Political Fictions, Joan Didion indicts the fakery of access journalism practiced by vacant politicos like the clintons, whom she sees as "purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news." (More Didion: "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.") |
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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 self-exclusion. ("I knew nuttin'.") 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 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. "
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Investor's Business Daily
In this light, Clinton's order to the CIA that it not use "unsavory characters" to collect information pushes irony to its outer limits. |
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Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden's organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden that Clinton authorized final preparations to launch. In each case, doubts about the intelligence aborted the mission... More than once, advisers recall, Clinton sounded out Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the prospect of using Special Forces to surprise bin Laden's fighters on the ground. But Clinton declined to authorize the large-scale operation that Shelton said would be required, and he chose not to order a less ambitious option to which the general would have objected.
Amid all of the spin there are germs of truth... I've been sitting on some info under the "loose lips" principle, but this article makes that no longer necessary. An Academy buddy of my cousin, himself a former Air Force pilot, is a Delta Force pilot. According to him, we had bin Laden "in our crosshairs" three times during the Clinton years, but couldn't get the kill order from higher up. His conclusion from the field was the reason for this failure was nothing more than a lack of the political will to get the job done. Which leads, yet again, to the obvious question: Would the attacks of 9/11 have happened, had President Clinton been up to the job with which he was entrusted? 7 posted on 12/18/01 10:12 PM Pacific by Sabertooth
I can't imagine that they would have happened if Clinton had done the job. 9/11 was the culmination of a series of increasingly brazen attacks on our interests, going all the way back to the original WTC bombing. As each attack happened, we were being watched by our enemies. They listened to what we said, but they really paid attention to what we did. And they eventually drew the conclusion that we were too weak and too soft to hit them back. It's painfully clear now that we didn't do nearly enough. Clinton didn't have the intestinal fortitude to do what Bush is doing now. Why? There are probably a lot of reasons: his 60's mentality and its accompanying disdain for the military; his addiction to polls; his preoccupation with crushing his enemies; his pursuit of personal pleasure; or his lack of interest in foreign policy. But I think the biggest reason of all is this: Bill Clinton, at his most basic level, is a weak, soft man, afraid to put his precious self at risk, more given to talk than to action. He was weak and soft at a time when he needed to be strong and resolute, and 9/11 was the result. He deserves nothing but contempt. Gee, I guess character does matter, after all. 53 posted on 12/19/01 10:23 PM Pacific by Rainbow Rising |
clinton is the quintessential coward. He is especially cowardly about acts physical, notwithstanding (or, more accurately, underscored by) an apparent facility in committing rapes, predations and willful, premeditated, opportunistic killings (e.g., the Sudan bombing, the Ricky Ray Rector execution). . . clinton cowardice knows no geographic bounds. We saw clinton cowardice in the Balkans...
We saw clinton cowardice in Africa...
I suspect clinton cowardice accounted for the cancellation of his trip to Greece, its streets teeming with anti-clinton demonstrators. (The Greeks, you may recall, were trying clinton in effigy for his wag-the-dog, desperately-seeking-a-legacy mass murders in the Balkans.) The world has clinton figured out: He is small, a greasy character, a degenerate, a predatory adolescent, a backwoods buffoon, a delusional if opportunistic narcissist. (Let us not forget that he was Nobel-Peace-Prize lobbying (read "hiring $100G-a-pop PR even as he imperiled Israel and empowered the terrorists"). While it is debatable whether clinton is most defined by his depravity, his narcissism or his cowardice, that he is in fact a coward is not open to question. If he won't go to Greece, with all the protections of the presidency, where will he go when we are finally rid of him? (Will we ever be finally rid of him?) (That the backwoods, backroom duo thought they could spin the world as they did Arkansas is a measure of their stupidity. They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiber-optic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.) Poetic justice in the end: clinton--both clintons, in fact--will be prisoners, both Cartesian and Freudian, of their own depravity, imprisioned in the hermetic confines of an evil, narcissistic life. Their world will finally and fittingly become as small as they, themselves, are. |
Also:
The Left is redolent with the peculiar stench of sinking-ship-jumping 'Rats
LOL! I wish I'd posted it in "Breaking News"!
Next year: "Impeachment Week"- celebrated all week long.
'"If you believe for a single second that this president isn't damaged and hurt by this (impeachment trial) you're deluding yourself," said Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd on ABC television Sunday.
"Impeachment is there forever," said respected Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. "It's there for all of history." '
BTTT
The very idea that Edwards would talk about bringing civility back into the legal/political system!!!!!!
Tell that to Dasshole and Gepnoheart and, most of all, tell it to roll her eyes - anti-American pouting Queen Hitlery and all her minions who have not stopped saying Bush is an illegitimate President!
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
Er...ah...Bill? Excuse me, but about Clintons legacy?.....
Don't look now, but he squandered it on Monica Lewinsky's dress....
P/S...How are the Chicoms treating you?
Let's not forget how much the Dems moaned and complained about Bush's lack of foreign policy experience and whether he was up for the job, while their HERO commits "one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history."
The conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.
But what's soooooooooooooooooo utterly maddening...the media goobers have these 'containment team' spinners on and act as if what they say about Clinton is legit. Last night on CNN, Paul Begala is spinning like a top, and the anchor lets him go on and on....doesn't challenge him, makes no mention of the obvious whoppers Begala is spitting out.
I flipped channels...I refuse to scream obscenities at the television so close to Christmas.
Begala is so disingenuous!! He said he wasn't at the meeting...DUH...like we won't figure out he was in on the conference call, on the fax list, and helps Clinton dream up all this crap.
Begala, I remember, was so proud of the crucifix he got from Pope Paul when he came to the US...maybe he thinks it absolves him of punishment for a career built on deception.
In a just world, this term would refer to three shifts of prison guards.
The only achievement I can think of is not getting hit by the plane that crashed into the white House lawn.The pilot in question will have to refile for a destination of Harlem.
"We"?
Do you own and operate FR? Try to stay on topic. If you don't like the thread, skip it.
Great post, Mia. As usual you get your point across with flair and in an eye-catching way.
Boy, am I sure glad I visited this thread. Flashing graphics, obnoxious colors - which are your trademark are all there, but what a hell of a job you did stringing all the info. together and tying up the loose ends!
Well done!! Kudos!!
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