Clinton vs. Fox News

Re: Clinton Admits to Serious Violation of US Law (on FOX news)

Man, I am killing for a cheeseburger and onion strings from P.J. Clarke's right now. Probably the best cheeseburger I've ever had.

 

Re: Clinton Admits to Serious Violation of US Law (on FOX news)

Tell me more. I'm undecided about lunch.

 

Re: Clinton Admits to Serious Violation of US Law (on FOX news)

We just got our first Sheetz last week. Gas prices all over town dropped from 2.35 to 1.91. I got two dogs and a Mountain Dew slushie last night.

 

Oliver North?
BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA!

 

I think I'd stick with the argument Clinton came off looking like a common ranting partisan. I don't think you're gonna be able to round up a lot of sympathy for Bin Laden, whether "assassinating" him is illegal or not. Sorry, Ollie.

 

Interesting column by Rick Salutin in today's Globe. Now, Rick Salutin is so far left he almost falls off the political spectrum. Thoughtful guy, though.

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A fine Clinton whine
RICK SALUTIN

From Friday's Globe and Mail


It was irritating to see former U.S. president Bill Clinton poke his finger in the chest of a TV interviewer on Sunday and whine that he at least tried to kill Osama bin Laden, even if he failed, while his successor, W., didn't even try till after 9/11. Some ex-Clinton aides went on a similar tear over a miniseries that showed them botching the Osama file.

I think it's a stupid debate. Maybe the Clintonites guessed right on the "intel" in that case and the Bushies didn't. But there's always intel on almost anything. The trick is to evaluate it and choose the right bits, among all the good, bad, lucky and unlucky guesses. The intel mountain has magnified massively since 9/11, as Ottawa lawyer Maureen Webb notes in her readable new book, Illusions of Security. Gobs of electronically generated scraps provide endless irrelevant "leads" based on verbal cues that set off recordings that must be evaluated, overwhelming the evaluators -- though the best clues are always found through human legwork, especially when it involves payouts or intimidation.

What rots my socks is how Bill Clinton has managed to focus attention on this particular difference in foreign policy between himself and George Bush, while not mentioning, or being called to account for, some far more ominous continuities. In fact, you could say Bill Clinton paved the way for George Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and strewed it with roses. W. owes him. Here's what I mean.

Bill Clinton was the first post-Cold War president. America had no rival. It was the sole superpower left standing. I doubt it occurred to U.S. policy-makers not to use that power: What was the point of "winning"? But there were some prerequisites. First, the rest of the world, in the form of the United Nations, had to be made acquiescent or irrelevant. Next, the exercise of power had to be justified in the name of humanitarian benevolence.

Let me capsulize the record. In late 1992, when Bill Clinton was president-elect, U.S. troops landed in Somalia, claiming humanitarian reasons. It was a UN-authorized mission, and ended with the Black Hawk Down incident. In 1995, the United States bombed Serb forces in Bosnia, again with UN sanction, and an even stronger humanitarian rationale: fear of genocide amid comparisons to Nazism. In 1999, NATO forces, led by the U.S., attacked Serbia and Kosovo, with the same justifications, but this time with no UN mandate. That was the turning point. In 2001, after 9/11, the U.S. attacked Afghanistan and, in 2003, it invaded Iraq. Neither had UN support, though the UN provided co-operation in the subsequent occupations. By then, the war on terror was a key motive, but humanitarian reasons were also invoked, especially in Iraq, when the other rationales dissolved. In Afghanistan, too, the cause of women, for instance, and democratization continue to be raised.

I confess that I found the international politics of the Clinton years confusing, in a way that Cold War conflicts were not. Why Somalia? There is always some impoverished, embattled place to help out that gets ignored. The U.S. Marines stormed ashore there as if it were Iwo Jima, but no one was trying to stop them. In retrospect, it seems like a display of the U.S. right to send its troops where it chose. The Yugoslav conflicts also seemed overhyped. Was it truly a replay of Hitler? By the time of his death in The Hague, charges of genocide against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had been dropped. A high-level Serb leader convicted of war crimes this week also had genocide charges eliminated. But as a way of building an impregnable case for unilateral military action, the stress on genocide etc. makes cynical strategic sense. The Clinton years did the spadework on these scenarios; the Bush wars have played out their implications.

I wouldn't expect Bill Clinton to acknowledge leaving this kind of legacy, though I'm not sure he left much else. Writing about Tony Blair in the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding says, "He is nearly always willing to take responsibility for his decisions, but very rarely for their consequences." You could put it on their gravestones, both of them.

 

I love Ollie throwing around "accountability," like he didn't go leaping through a loophole to keep his lying ass out of prison.

 

"Clarke's book [Against All Enemies] is also a crucial complement to the September 11 panel's failure to condemn Mr. Clinton's failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting. Mr. Clarke never mentions that President Bush had no chances to kill bin Laden before September 11 and leaves readers with the false impression that he, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, did their best to end the bin Laden threat. That trio, in my view, abetted al Qaeda, and if the September 11 families were smart they would focus on the dereliction of Dick [Clarke], Bill [Clinton] and Sandy [Berger] and not the antics of convicted September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui."

Michael Scheuer

 

"I don't consider Osama Bin Laden to be a terrorist."

Michael Scheuer, April 2006

 

During North's stupid Senate candidacy, he was often heard exclaiming, "Bill Clinton is not my president!" Asked about that at a WH press conference, Clinton said:

"Those words don't bother me nearly as much as the fact that Mr. North did not act as if Ronald Reagan was his president, either, when he had the chance."

Brilliant.

 

This is not news, although I need to realize the poster. Clinton gave details in his autobiography of the attempts to get bin Laden

 

Sure it is. It completley contradicts what Clinton had to say on Fox .

Clinton is first President in my lifetime that I have ever seen defend his policies after he was in office. He really comes off as needy .