Hillary Mum on Bill's Bush Shock Attack from Foreign Soil (Bush Was Right)

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has so far declined to comment on her husband's shocking address to Britain's annual Labour Party conference this week in Blackpool, England, a speech described by British newspapers as "a devastating attack" on President Bush.

Calls requesting comment from the Senator or her spokespersons, placed by NewsMax.com on Friday to her offices in New York and Washington, D.C., have gone unreturned, with Clinton herself volunteering no public reaction.

Though U.S. news coverage of Mr. Clinton's speech has downplayed the unprecedented attack on his successor, a move that completely violated protocol for former presidents, British press accounts have been far more candid.

In fact, the ex-president pulled out all the stops in an effort to portray Britain's Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair as the world's last best hope to rein in America's reckless cowboy president as he plunges the West into war in the Mideast.

And in an even sharper break with the tradition that Americans not criticize their own government from foreign soil, Clinton went so far as to paint Bush as an illegitimate president, suggested he was not working hard enough to effect "non-military regime change" in Iraq, and complained that it's wrong for the U.S. to try to dominate the world.

He also blamed the Reagan administration for giving Saddam Hussein chemical weapons that he later used to gas the Kurds in the 1980's, a charge flatly denied last week by Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.

In a naked attempt to pit Prime Minister Blair against the Bush White House, Clinton made it clear to the Blackpool conference that he was counting on British leadership to put the brakes on Bush's preemptive strike policy towards Iraq.

"Weighing the risks and making the calls are what we elect leaders to do, and I can tell you that as an American, and a citizen of the world, I am glad that Tony Blair will be central to weighing the risks and making the call," the top Democrat told the Labourites.

"The rest of us should support his efforts in the United Nations and until they fail we do not have to cross bridges we would prefer not to cross," he added.

The ex-president went out of his way to portray Britain's governing party as being at odds with "conservatives in America."

"I think this whole Iraq issue is made more difficult for some of you because of the differences you have with the conservatives in America over other matters, over the criminal court and the Kyoto Treaty and the comprehensive test ban treaty," he told the Labourites.

In an attempt to capitalize on growing anti-American sentiment amongst the British left, Clinton reminded his audience that he also disagreed with the Bush administration "on nearly everything: on budget policy, tax policy, on education policy, on environmental policy, on health care policy. I have a world of disagreements with them."

Then, in one of the uglier moments of his speech, the former U.S. president portrayed Bush's 2000 election as illegitimate, complaining sarcastically, "The election was so close in America that they won it fair and square -- 5 to 4 at the Supreme Court."

"We should actually be glad, though," Clinton continued to grouse. "Because there were seven Republicans and only two Democrats on the Supreme Court -- and two of those Republicans - God bless them, they will be rewarded in heaven - they actually took the decision that we should count votes when the American people vote, and I appreciate that."

Clinton said that while he supported "regime change" in Iraq, he disagreed with the White House's support for preemptive military action against Iraq.

"If the inspections go forward, I believe we should still work for a regime change in Iraq in non-military ways," he told the Labourites, apparently oblivious to reports this week on that U.S. aircraft patrolling the no fly zone have been fired upon by Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries.

Then, playing right into the hands of Baghdad's propaganda machine, Clinton warned, "A preemptive action today, however well justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future..... I do not care how precise your bombs and your weapons are -- when you set them off, innocent people will die."

While downplaying the Iraqi threat, the ex-president seemed particularly concerned that his own country had grown too powerful.

"You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. And America can lead the world towards that, but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction," he told the Blackpool crowd.

Clinton's most outrageously partisan assault on the U.S. came when he told his foreign audience that the Reagan administration was to blame for giving Saddam Hussein the technology he needed to launch his bioweapons program, technology later deployed against the Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands.

The West has a lot to answer for in Iraq, " the ex-president told the Labourites. "When Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds and the Iranians -- there was hardly a peep in the West because he was (fighting) Iran. Evidence has now come to light that in the early 1980s the United States may have even supplied him with the materials necessary to start the bio-weapons program."

"We cannot forget that we are not blameless in the misery under which they suffer," Clinton charged.

The former U.S. leader leveled the allegation that the U.S. shared responsibility for the Iraqi genocide despite a nationally televised denial just days earlier from Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.

"It's a total lie for one thing. Let's just start with that," Weinberger said responding to the bioweapons charge, in a Sept. 30 interview with Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes. "It's not even close to being anything remotely resembling the truth," he added.

http://speakout.com/activism/news/5653-1.html

Another Pardon, Another Controversy

by Jim Geraghty, SpeakOut.com Staff Writer

Thursday, February 22, 2001

Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate campaign treasurer helped obtain last-minute pardons for two convicted felons from former President Clinton, lawyers told the AP.
President Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich has become the dominant news story of the first month of the Bush presidency. But just as the Rich story seemed to have played itself out, a new round of controversies about other Clinton pardons has surfaced. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother Hugh was asked to return $400,000 he was paid in exchange for lobbying for two of the Clinton pardons and her Senate campaign treasurer apparently helped obtain last-minute pardons for two convicted felons.

Hugh Rodham received a contingency fee in connection with a pardon application for Glen Braswell and a fee for work on Carlos Vignali's commutation application. In 1995, Vignali was convicted of masterminding a scheme to distribute 800 pounds of crack cocaine, worth millions of dollars, from Los Angeles to a narcotics ring in Minneapolis. Glenn Braswell, a marketer of health treatments, was convicted for perjury and mail fraud in 1983 and is currently under investigation for tax evasion and money laundering.

"I'm disappointed, I'm very saddened, and I was very disturbed when I heard about it," she said. "I have not spoken with him. I do not want to speak with him because, frankly, I didn't want anybody to draw any wrong conclusions about what I might or might not have said to him, so I have not spoken with him."

Hugh Rodham returned the money late yesterday. The House Government Reform Committee has demanded documents and answers from Rodham.

In comments before reporters today, Senator Clinton said she was "very disappointed" with her brother, while reserving judgment on her campaign treasurer, William Cunningham III.

Cunningham is the law partner of longtime Clinton adviser Harold Ickes. Cunningham said the firm was paid $4,000 for the work of preparing and sending the applications to the Justice Department. He said he neither contacted the White House nor discussed the pardons with Hillary Clinton or the former president. The two men, Robert Clinton Fain and James Lowell Manning, were convicted in the 1980s on tax charges.

Cunningham said he did not believe his role as Clinton's treasurer during her Senate campaign in New York last year had any effect on the ex-president's decision.

"My connection is really with Senator Clinton, and not the president," Cunningham said. "These applications really cried out on the merits that these are the folks who should be pardoned, and the fact that their request was assembled by me really operates independently," he said.

"I know Mr. Cunningham is a fine person and a good lawyer," Senator Clinton said. "And I know lawyers prepare and process pardon applications. So I'm not going to make any statement of any kind about something I know nothing about, other than to please ask you to make a distinction between Mr. Cunningham's background and experience and my brother, who as a family member, should not have been involved in this situation."

President Clinton has repeatedly denied that any impropriety was involved in the decision to grant the pardons.

"In the last few months of my term, many, many people called, wrote or came up to me asking that I grant or at least consider granting clemency in various cases," Clinton wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times Sunday. "These people included friends, family members, former spouses of applicants, supporters, acquaintances, Republican and Democratic members of Congress, journalists and total strangers. I believe that the president can and should listen to such requests, although they cannot determine his decision on the merits. There is only one prohibition: there can be no quid pro quo. And there certainly was not in this or any of the other pardons and commutations I granted."

At the White House today, President Bush refused to comment further on the pardon controversy. "I've got too much to do -- to get a budget passed, to get reforms passed for education, to get a tax cut passed, to strengthen the military -- than to be worrying about decisions that my predecessor made," Bush said.

[Thank God Bush was whipping the military into shape as early as February. But as Sean Hannity says, we cannot defeat evil until we first defeat liberalism. I personally think that the Clintonista brand of liberalism is particularly toxic. FReegards....]

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

Friday, Aug. 23, 2002 Top Arkansas Democrat Shuns Clinton No wonder he moved to New York: Bill Clinton is so disliked in his former home state that Arkansas' top Democrat candidate wants nothing to do with him. "A former president without honor in his own land?" today's Washington Post said. Yes indeed. The party announced Clinton was attending a would-be "Countdown to Victory" rally Monday in West Memphis. But the Dems' "marquee name," Senate nominee Mark Pryor, is boycotting. His lame excuse is that he needs to rest before the next day's debate between Pryor and Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson. "The real reason, partisans on both sides allow, may have more to do with Clinton's unpopularity in his native state owing to his less-than-upright behavior in the White House," the Post reported. "Pryor, the state's attorney general and son of former senator David Pryor, is making a strong bid for the moral rectitude vote, particularly because of Hutchinson's 1999 divorce followed by a marriage to a former staffer. A joint appearance with Clinton could muddy that message." He's No Clinton Pryor handler Michael Teague insisted his boss was not from "the Bill Clinton school of politics." A spokesman for Hutchinson noted that the senator would be proud to appear with President Bush at a fundraiser in Arkansas three days after Clinton's visit.

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