The Real Danger of a Presidential Faker: Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo Presidency

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 1.6.02 | Mia T

[Mia T]

The Real Danger of a Presidential Faker:

Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo Presidency

by Mia T, 1.06.02

 

In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled &emdash; giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.

They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected...

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

Just look around this chamber. We have members from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And America is stronger for it. But as we have seen, these differences all too often spark hatred and division, even here at home. . . This is not the American way. We must draw the line. Without delay, we must pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

bill clinton, State of Union Speech, January 27, 2000

"I'm sorry, but the president is one of the crudest men I have ever encountered in government service," says one female agent. "He has no respect for women."

Among the comments clinton made in presence of Secret Service agents:

. Frequent speculation on the oral sex skills of women

the president saw or met in receiving lines;

. References to the size of a woman's breasts, legs or figure;

. Sexual jokes.

After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, however, clinton toned down his rhetoric and behavior in front of his Secret Service agents, but those who guarded the president say enough of them saw and heard things which could be damaging to clinton.

"It depends on who Ken Starr calls," says one ex-agent. "The people who are on the job today are not necessarily the ones who know the most."

Turnover In clinton's Secret Service Detail 'Highest That Anyone Can Remember'

In the months that follow, reporters drop the issue. Feminists say little or nothing. Rape crisis center workers acknowledge that Broaddrick's case, including her reluctance to come forward, is typical of victims of sexual assault. But they decline to speak against clinton. Some cite the federal funding they receive as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into law by clinton.

Why does the press continue to ignore the Juanita Broaddrick story?

 

 

The Placebo President:

How a Rapist can be a Policy Feminist

 

placebo effect n.

A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment

that arises from the patient's expectations concerning

the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.

 

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

----Sylvia Plath

 

The placebo effect immediately came to mind

as I listened to Shelby Steele,

a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,

debunk the following pernicious spin intended to save clinton.

To wit:

A proven felon and utter reprobate can remain president;

clinton can be a failed human being but a good president.

 

The error in these statements arises, says Steele,

from the belief that

virtuousness is separate from personal responsibility

so that one's virtuousness as an individual is determined by

one's political positions on issues rather than on

whether or not in one's personal life there is a

consistency and a responsibility.

 

Steele's contention is that this compartmentalization,

rather than being the amazing advantage

the clintons would have us believe,

in fact, spills toxicity into, corrupts, the culture.

 

If mere identification with good policies is what makes one virtuous

then those policies become, what Steele calls, iconographic,

that is to say they just represent virtuousness.

They don't necessarily do virtuous things.

 

If clinton's semantic parsing strips meaning from our words,

clinton's iconographic policies strip meaning from our society,

systematically deconstructing our society as a democracy. . .

 

I would take Shelby Steele's thesis one step further.

I maintain that iconographic policy functions like a placebo,

producing a real, physiological and social effects.

 

The placebo effect is, after all, the brain's triumph over reality.

Expectation alone can produce powerful physiological results.

The placebo effect was, at one time, an evolutionary advantage:

act now, think later

 

bill clinton is the paradigmatic Placebo President.

Placebo is Latin for "I shall please."

And please he does

doling out sham treatments, iconographs, with abandon.

To please, to placate, to numb, to deflect.

Ultimately to showcase his imagined virtue.

Or to confute his genuine vice.

 

clinton will dispense sugar pills (or bombs)

at the drop of a high-heeled shoe...

or at the hint of high treason...

 

clinton's charlatanry mimics that of primitive medicine.

Through the 1940s, doctors had little effective medicine to offer

so they deliberately attempted to induce the placebo response.

 

The efficaciousness of today's medicines

does not diminish the power of the placebo.

A recent review of placebo-controlled studies

found that placebos and genuine treatments

are often equally effective.

If you expect to get better, you will.

 

Which brings me back to the original question:

Can clinton be a failed human being but a good president?

 

Clearly he cannot.

These two propositions are mutually exclusive.

clinton's fundamental failure is a complete lack of integrity.

He has violated his covenant with the American people.

 

Because clinton has destroyed his moral authority as a leader,

he can no longer function even as a quack;

the placebo effect is gone.

And so the Placebo President must now go, too.

 

 

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

The Sunday Times (U.K.)

01/06/2002

Posted on 1/5/02 4:11 PM Pacific by Pokey78

 

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton turned down at least three offers involving foreign governments to help to seize Osama Bin Laden after he was identified as a terrorist who was threatening America, according to sources in Washington and the Middle East.

Clinton himself, according to one Washington source, has described the refusal to accept the first of the offers as "the biggest mistake" of his presidency.

The main reasons were legal: there was no evidence that could be brought against Bin Laden in an American court. But former senior intelligence sources accuse the administration of a lack of commitment to the fight against terrorism.

When Sudanese officials claimed late last year that Washington had spurned Bin Laden's secret extradition from Khartoum in 1996, former White House officials said they had no recollection of the offer. Senior sources in the former administration now confirm that it was true.

An Insight investigation has revealed that far from being an isolated incident this was the first in a series of missed opportunities right up to Clinton's last year in office. One of these involved a Gulf state; another would have relied on the assistance of Saudi Arabia.

In early 1996 America was putting strong pressure on Sudan's Islamic government to expel Bin Laden, who had been living there since 1991. Sources now reveal that Khartoum sent a former intelligence officer with Central Intelligence Agency connections to Washington with an offer to hand over Bin Laden &emdash; just as it had put another terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, into French hands in 1994.

At the time the State Department was describing Bin Laden as "the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world" and was accusing Sudan of harbouring terrorists. The extradition offer was turned down, however. A former senior White House source said: "There simply was not the evidence to prosecute Osama Bin Laden. He could not be indicted, so it would serve no purpose for him to have been brought into US custody."

A former figure in American counterterrorist intelligence claims, however, that there was "clear and convincing" proof of Bin Laden's conspiracy against America.

In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled &emdash; giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.

They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected.

Clinton is reported to have admitted how things went wrong in Sudan at a private dinner at a Manhattan restaurant shortly after September 11 last year. According to a witness, Clinton told a dinner companion that the decision to let Bin Laden go was probably "the biggest mistake of my presidency".

Clinton could not be reached for comment yesterday, but a
former senior White House official acknowledged that the Sudan episode had been a "screw-up".

A second offer to get Bin Laden came unofficially from Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American millionaire who was a donor to Clinton's election campaign in 1996. On July 6, 2000, he visited John Podesta, then the president's chief of staff, to say that intelligence officers from a Gulf state were offering to help to extract Bin Laden.

Details of the meeting are confirmed in an exchange of e-mails between the White House and Ijaz, which have been seen by The Sunday Times. According to Ijaz, the offer involved setting up an Islamic relief fund to aid Afghanistan in return for the Taliban handing over Bin Laden to the Gulf state. America could then extract Bin Laden from there.

The Sunday Times has established that after a fierce internal row about the sincerity of the offer, the White House responded by sending Richard Clarke, Clinton's most senior counterterrorism adviser, to meet the rulers of the United Arab Emirates. They denied there was any such offer. Ijaz, however, maintained that the White House had thereby destroyed the deal, which was to have been arranged only through unofficial channels. Ijaz said that weeks later on a return trip to the Gulf he was taken on a late-night ride into the desert by his contact who told him that Clarke's front-door approach had upset a delicate internal balance and blown the deal. "Your government has missed a major opportunity," he recalls being told.

Senior former government sources said that Ijaz's offer had been treated in good faith but, with the denial of the UAE government, there was nothing to suggest it had credibility.

A third more mysterious offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of Bin Laden's mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer.

Richard Shelby, the leading Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said he was aware of a Saudi offer to help although, under rules protecting classified information, he was unable to discuss the details of any offer. Commenting generally, he said: "I don't believe that the fight against terrorism was the number one goal of the Clinton administration. I believe there were some lost opportunities."

Q ERTY4 + Q ERTY6 = rodham clinton REALITY CHECK!

 

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 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. "

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!

 

also:

 

CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme Fails Again

Ollie North Laughs Ann Lewis Off Stage

 

Helen Thomas Syndrome: THE SYMPTOMS

 

Will Riefenstahl-esque "editing to perfection" resurrect the clintons?

 

WHOSE DOG WAS WAGGED?

 

Frankenstein, The Sequel:

'Black Hawk Down' Was Set to Blame Clinton for 9/11

 

hillary's head revisited:

hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) II

 

Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers

[DoctorMichael]

Hahahahahaha!!!!!!! Great juxtapositioning in this and other pastiches.........as usual!

[SusanUSA]

Fabulous job, Mia! Thanks for the pings.

[no-s]

you are sooo, sooo, cool. thanks.

[Simcha7]

Shalom!

Hi...Mia T, Doug and My Fellow Freepers:

Excellent Post Mia, and Doug that's quite a Song.

Did you post the entire Song?

If so what thread is it on?

[Mia T]

HILLARY CLINTON CO-SPONSORS DEBBIE SMITH ACT "TO PUT THE RAPISTS IN JAIL"

 

or. . .

 

How a Rapist can be a Policy Feminist II