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It would be foolhardy to confuse 'vulgar' with 'irrelevant.' The clintons are vulgar, common, vacuous, small...but as long as they still wield power, they are not irrelevant...

Backed by his adviser (and former Clinton Treasury Secretary) Robert Rubin, Daschle claims that George W. Bush's tax cuts of spring 2001 are responsible for a budgetary swing from surplus to deficit. This is essentially nonsense...
More, attaching this recession to Bush -- another Daschle maneuver -- is the height of silliness. Let's review the timeline: The recession officially began in March, less than two months after Bush took office. Blame Clinton. Blame the Fed. Blame OPEC. But don't blame Bush. In terms of the stock market, business production, and profits, it actually began near the middle of 2000, seven months before Bush took office.
But Daschle stumbles on...
Then there's the Rubin argument that we should run surpluses all the time, even in recessions, in order to get long-term bond rates down. This is a tax-raising Herbert Hoover strategy -- or, in current parlance, it is a Japanese strategy. Recession-prone Japan has a 1.5 percent long-bond rate, and they also have the most massive build-up of yearly deficits and cumulative debt in the history of man.
An honest Keynesian, much less a supply-sider, would today argue for an additional $150 billion for spending or tax-cut measures to stimulate recovery. Supply-siders, of course, prefer tax cuts. Yet tax-cut recommendations from places not necessarily known as supply-side havens are now popping up. Just recently, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recommended a return to Ronald Reagan's 28 percent tax rate. And a recent study by the non-partisan Cambridge, Mass., based National Bureau of Economic Research proved empirically that lower personal tax-rates would promote greater small-business growth, leading to higher tax receipts for the federal government. Note to Daschle: America is talking tax cuts, as are academics on both sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Larry Kudlow, Daschle's dimness

"The Daschle Scheme"

by Mia T, 01-10-02

While this fiasco of a presidential debut is certainly not the first indication of Daschle's "dimness," the "Daschle scheme" may not be as ill-conceived as it first appears. The assumption being made--incorrectly, in my view--is that Daschle hatched the plan...or, at a minimum, supports it.

But the following bits of circumstantial evidence suggest otherwise:

Rubin flanks Daschle. Why would clinton moneyman, Robert Rubin, choose give his imprimatur to a scheme that is so transparently dumb?
The clintons have a history of demagoguing the economy, 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 an unqualified candidate viable, a depraved president tolerable, a president's successor feckless, an ex-president wistfully longed for... and his wife craved in '04.
Inside info that the clintons are still controlling the Democratic Party, applying the carrot (McAulliffe et al. $$$) and the stick (Filegate) synergistically.

I would argue that the "Daschle scheme" is really the clinton "it's the economy, stupid" scheme in another guise. Its purpose is strictly presidential--invalidate Daschle and position the pantsuited clinton (as opposed to the pantless one)...in one fell swoop.
P.S. "Honest Keynesian" is oxymoronic and was likely a wry Kudlow construction. Keynesianism's raison d'être, after all, is to undermine free-society, free-market economists and politicos even as it justifies their socialist counterparts. Keynesian myths persist today largely because people blame the perversities of Keynesian policies (and the politicos who push them) on imagined inherent defects in the market system. (See: James Galbraith depreciates clinton economic policy)

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 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!