posted on July 10, 2003 08:48:33 AM new
William Jefferson Clinton
42nd president of the United States of America
Born William Jefferson Blythe IV in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946, he took the last name of step-father Roger Clinton of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
He was elected President after promising 65 different special interest groups he would cut the military budget and spend every penny on their particular agenda.
He was sworn in on January 20, 1993. Four years later, on November 5, 1996, He was re-elected for a second four-year term.
His lasting presidential legacy is that he became the only president of the 20th century to be impeached for lying under oath about his use of cigars with 21 year-old White House intern Monica Lewinski.
The Clinton Collection
President Clinton had little interest in reading, preferring TV and peeking through keyholes for his main sources of information. This resulted in the one of the smallest literary collections ever assembled for a presidential library. Fortunately, a number of the volumes in his personal library were collected before they made it to the shredder, and are preserved for posterity. A number of his more special volumes had the pages mysteriously glued together, but diligent restoration work by the U.S. Library of Congress Archives Restoration Section has opened them up for the public to view.
President Clinton took great comfort in reading the classics. Among the greatest treasures in his personal collection were an original March 1986 copy of Playboy featuring the article "Can Jack Kemp Outplay Bill Bradley" It was believed that this was the principal document that made him decide to run for his first term.
This November 1973 copy of Penthouse, found stuck to Lincoln's bed, was his constant companion from early youth. It contained Marco Vassi's classic story, "Sex Beyond Sex", and is believed to be the chief cause of "Little Willie" beginning to bend toward the left.
The President always kept his closest friends at his fingertips. His personal address book revealed his belief in communicating with ordinary citizens, as it contained over 700 addresses of hotel maids, waitresses, babysitters and other common folk.
The book is currently undergoing restoration at the Library of Congress and will be displayed as soon as a damaged page is repaired.
Although Bill Clinton was a draft-dodger, and did not serve in the military as did former presidents George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Harry Truman, he loved to play Army Guy. He could often be seen wearing an Air Force A-2 flying jacket with an Armored Division patch on the front.
He quickly became the first civilian commander in chief to salute his marine guards while entering or exiting an aircraft. Apparently, none of his staff had to the courage to tell him that civilians, and particularly draft-dodgers, do not have the right to salute anyone for any reason.
Nevertheless, it was a fun fantasy game for him, and he continued to play Army Guy until his term expired.
The late Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut requested and received an English translation of the Nazi Gun Laws from the Library of Congress to use as a model for his firearms reform. Upon his passing, the book passed to his son, Senator Christopher J. Dodd. It is believed that this volume was given to President Clinton to form the basis for his anti-gun agenda. It is much revered by both the President and Mrs. Brady, and the Library was fortunate to have retained this only known copy.
This volume was reportedly Bill Clinton's constant companion. In it, he found solace in the face of adversity, and mastery of the phrase,
"It depends what you mean by...."
Clinton's
Military Policy
Inspiration
Lacking personal military experience, Clinton often turned to Oriental sources for guidance in formulation of his military policy.
The Chinese were delighted to assist him in cutting the U.S. Military down to ineffective size, and further provided him with guidance in his famous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy toward gays in the military.
Bill's Favorite Puppet
While some credit the economy during his tenure to American Business or Republican Alan Greenspan, Clinton assures us this was not so.
"Greenspan was only doing what I told him to", insists Clinton. "He was nothing more than a puppet for my enlightened economic policy incentives."
(Please note: A full list of Clinton's original economic policy incentives will be added to the Presidential Library as soon as they are located. To date, we have not been able to locate a single one.)
True to his campaign promise, President Clinton began immediately trimming the military to 30% of it's former strength, guided by the manual shown, which he reportedly helped to write. His task - punishing the Armed Forces who frequently mooned him when his back was turned - was inadvertently aided by former President George Bush, who had previously reduced the Armed Forces to it's smallest practical size following the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
When the general public became aware in mid-1998 that the U.S. Armed Forces no longer had the capacity to fight a war on the scale of a Desert Storm, Clinton immediately announced a strengthening of forces to counter the deficiency, which he promptly blamed on former President Bush after a careful reading of The Perfection of Falsehood (above).
Presidential Cigar & Accessories
Since his Vice-President , Al Gore, had spent his youth as a poor black kid in the tobacco fields of Tennessee, President Clinton occasionally enjoyed a good cigar. He never inhaled, of course, and was proud to have pioneered the notion that tobacco products could be enjoyed safely.
Monica's Dress
Preserved both as a contemporary style example and as a presidential DNA sample, this fashionable frock was typical of the attire of Clinton's generation, and well worth preserving for history.
"I always liked that dress", said the President "... and maybe some day they're be able to clone me.....".
Presidential Law License
Found in a trash bin behind the Offices of the Arkansas Bar Association, this diploma is believed to be the law license of President Clinton which was used by him while Attorney General of the State of Arkansas
Presidential Draft Card
Recently discovered in a former KGB Office in Moscow, this is believed to be the remains of President Clinton's Vietnam era draft card when he was a Rhodes Scholar whose tuition was being paid by the taxpayers of the United States.
Later, Clinton would visit Vietnam during his final legacy-building dash to become the first President to do something other than be remembered only for having run around the oval office with his pants down around his ankles for 8 years.
Presidential Honors
When Clinton lobbed 21 Tomahawk missiles into downtown Baghdad, killing 9 innocent civilians at a cost of $25.2 million, he set an all-time record for cost-per-murder, earning kudos from groups interested in that sort of thing.
"Killing is really fun", said Clinton. "Especially when you're safely behind bulletproof glass. This is better than a video game!"
Presidential Counselors
Clinton was a deeply religious pervert, and often turned to the Clergy for spiritual guidance.
Here the Reverend Jesse Jackson whispers his personal formula for dorking the hired help without getting caught. Unfortunately, the Reverend Jackson's counsel was slightly flawed in this particular case.
Broken Presidential Tooth
In the last week of his presidency, Bill Clinton mistakenly crunched down on a handfull of W's which had been removed from White House keyboards.
"I thought they were M&M's", he said.
Clinton's Entrepreneurial Spirit
The President clearly understood the entrepreneurial spirit, even though his Whitewater enterprise failed.
His second attempt at supplementing his meager salary as chief executive was a much greater success.
Clinton's most Unusual Award
In his failed attempt to ban "assault rifles", President Clinton unintentionally made this style of rifle the most popular collectable in America. So great was the demand, that five new manufacturers were launched, and well over 1,000,000 new semiautomatic versions of the popular Military M16 came into the hands of law-abiding citizens.
posted on July 10, 2003 09:51:37 AM new
Not to downplay anything, but Clinton is no longer president. He hasn't been president for 3 years. Why can't we get over it? I still find what he did or didn't too far less bothersome that what the current administration has been up to. JMO
posted on July 10, 2003 10:33:17 AM new
Cheryl - it's simple - Republican just can't accept tht the guy was popular and that the country prospered during his administration. They definately do not want to invite comparisions so they twist and turn and try to put his administration in as negative a light as possible hoping that you will be so outraged and disgusted that you will forget that you can't find a decent job and that unemployments rates are still rising and that home foreclosures are at an all time high while our military has become the equivalent of ducks in an Iraqi shooting gallery and we prepare to spend a few billion more dollars that we don't have to play god in still another region.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
- Thomas Edison
posted on July 10, 2003 11:20:06 AM new
We don't have to TRY to place Clinton in a bad light, he did it him self.
The Loyalty Mystery ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE
ASHINGTON -- I love a mystery: what inspires the phenomenal loyalty to Bill Clinton?
There he stands in the dock, impeached as a perjurer, certain of more censure, roundly denounced by even political allies for weaknesses that dishonored his office.
Yet not one of the aides who call themselves betrayed has turned on him. Not one of his appointees has resigned in disgust. Not one close associate or lawyer still living has crumbled, though under intense pressure of the threat of jail, to testify against him.
Through all the revelations of deceit, his wife steadfastly grasps his hand. His political party marches lockstep down the line to protect him. And the public, in opinion polls and at the polling booth, stands by him more staunchly with each step toward historic shame.
That's loyalty across the board, the likes of which this nation has never seen before. What's behind it?
Because his personal approval rating is far below his job approval rating, most of us have assumed that his support is strictly the product of rampant prosperity. It seems as if the majority is saying, we're all right, Jack, and don't rock the boat.
But I've begun to wonder. Good times cannot explain it all.
What, for example, undergirds the grim loyalty of Susan McDougal or makes Web Hubbell "just have to roll over again"? Without a powerful psychological tie, they would have cracked years ago. Or what motivates Harold Ickes, coolly stiffed by Clinton for the promotion to chief of staff, but still determinedly disremembering dirty dealings that might implicate the President?
What beyond stubbornness drives Janet Reno, losing professional respect and her own health, to cling to office longer than any Attorney General this century? What beyond a sense of duty induces William Cohen, who jumped party ship to impeach Nixon, to remain at the helm of the Pentagon and bear the scorn of critics who see his Iraqi missile-lobbing as Clinton impeachment-lobbying?
That's only the beginning of the loyalty mystery. Hillary Clinton told an interviewer a year ago that if her husband were proved to be lying, that would be "a serious offense." After evidence forced him to admit it, she found the offense less serious. Blind love? Shared political goals? Joint vast-conspiracy hatred? Or old-fashioned loyalty?
Now to the enigma within. Two out of three Americans -- a far higher percentage than those who voted for him -- are willing to abide with him even if the charges are true. Why?
Some don't want to deal with public unpleasantness. Others don't want snoops prying into their own private lives. Others retain a reverence for the Presidency, no matter what the leader or sibling-figure does. Add those to the hard-core liberals and minorities who see their man as a fire wall against spreading lava from the right.
But there must be something else -- in some undiscovered region from which no media biggie reports -- to explain the incredible attachment of this great nation to this ungreat man.
Could it be the Kulturkampf with its weapons of messy personal destruction? In this social conflict, moralizing geezers say to boomers, "You see where all your 60's pot and protest and permissiveness have brought us?" and graying boomers reply, "Get a life and swing a little, Gramps." Meanwhile, the Self-Absorbed Generation, living in surplus, pages itself on cell phones and is oblivious to such squabbling among its buying-powerless elders.
Only partly. Could it also be partly that those victorious a generation ago in overturning an election are infuriated by any comparison of cover-ups? To prevent a "payback time" that would de-demonize Nixon, the aging Good Guys of yesteryear are impelled to loyally minimize Clinton's crimes.
The solution to the Clinton loyalty mystery is greater than the sum of these partlys. Peeling this onion down to its tears, you discover a widespread affection for this likable lame-duck liar as fervent as a minority's distaste for him. His many weaknesses become his strength.
Loyalty, we discover, need not be a two-way street. Clinton is a loyalty blotter; he sops it up. He is impervious to calumny because he is confident of that loyalty, which multiplies it. Even as reckoning looms, nothing sticks to him except the majority.
When Bill Clinton is 7, his family moves from Hope, Arkansas, to the long-time mob resort of Hot Springs, AR. Here Al Capone is said to have had permanent rights to suite 443 of the Arlington Hotel. Clinton's stepfather is a gun-brandishing, alcoholic who loses his Buick franchise through mismanagement and his own pilfering. He physically abuses his family, including the young Bill. His mother is a heavy gambler with mob ties. According to FBI and local police officials, his Uncle Raymond -- to whom young Bill turns for wisdom and support -- is a colorful car dealer, slot machine owner and gambling operator, who thrives (except when his house is firebombed) on the fault line of criminality.
PAUL BOSSON, Hot Springs Prosecutor: In Hot Springs, growing up here, you were living a lie. You lived a lie because you knew that all of these activities were illegal. I mean, as soon as you got old enough to be able to read a newspaper, you knew that gambling in Arkansas was illegal, prostitution was illegal. And so you lived this lie, so you have to find some way to justify that to yourself and, you know, you justify it by saying, "Well," you know, "it's okay here."
VIRGINIA KELLY, Clinton's mother (1923-1994): Hot Springs was so different. We had wide-open gambling, for one thing, and it was so wide open that it never occurred to me that it was illegal _ it really didn't _ until it came to a vote about whether we were going to legalize gambling or not. I never was so shocked.
1960s
A federal investigation concludes that Hot Springs has the largest illegal gambling operations in the United States.
Clinton goes to Georgetown University where he finds a mentor in Professor Carroll Quigley. Quigley writes: "That the two political parties should represent opposed ideals and policies. . . is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical . . .The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in detail, procedure, priority, or method. "
Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government is using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft. According to former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich Clinton is told by Oxford officials that he is no longer welcome there.
Bill Clinton and his friend Jim McDougal get a job in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright. The Washington Post will later write, "McDougal was interested in making money while Clinton was obsessed with political stature."
After becoming involved in politics, Wellesley graduate Hillary Rodham orders her senior thesis sealed from public view.
1969
Clinton meets a 19-year-old woman in a English bar and has sex with her. She will say she was raped; Clinton will claim it was consensual. A retired State Department official will tell the news service, Capitol Hill Blue, in the late 1990s, "There is no doubt in my mind that this woman suffered severe emotional trauma. But we were under tremendous pressure to avoid the embarrassment of having a Rhodes Scholar charged with rape. I filed a report to my superiors and that was the last I heard of it." The victim's family decline to pursue the case.
1972 A 22-year-old woman tells campus police at Yale University that she was sexually assaulted by Clinton, a law student at the college. No charges are filed, but retired campus policemen contacted by Capitol Hill Blue news service in the 1990s confirm the incident. The woman also confirms the incident, but declines to discuss it further.
1974
27 year old Clinton, only months out of Yale Law School, is back in Arkansas eager to run for Congress. Roger Morris writes later, "A relative unknown, he faces an imposing field of rivals in the Democratic primary, and beyond, in the general election, a powerful Republican incumbent. Yet as soon as he enters the race, Mr. Clinton enjoys a decisive seven-to-one advantage in campaign funds over the nearest Democratic competitor, and will spend twice as much as his well-supported GOP opponent. It begins with a quiet meeting at his mother's house in Hot Springs. Around the kitchen table, as Virginia Clinton will describe the scene, avid young Billy meets with two of his most crucial early backers -- uncle Raymond G. Clinton, a prosperous local Buick dealer, and family friend and wealthy businessman Gabe Crawford. As they talk, Mr. Crawford offers the candidate unlimited use of his private plane, and uncle Raymond not only provides several houses around the district to serve as campaign headquarters, but will secure a $10,000 loan to Bill from the First National Bank of Hot Springs - an amount then equal to the yearly income of many Arkansas families. Together, the money and aircraft and other gifts, including thousands more in secret donations, will launch Mr. Clinton in the most richly financed race in the annals of Arkansas -- and ultimately onto the most richly financed political career in American history. Though he loses narrowly , his showing is so impressive, especially in his capacity to attract such money and favours, that he rises rapidly to become state attorney-general, then governor, and eventually, with much the same backing and advantage, president of the United States . . . No mere businessman with a spare plane, Gabe Crawford presided over a backroom bookie operation that was one of Hot Springs' most lucrative criminal enterprises. [And the] inimitable uncle Raymond - who had also played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in keeping young Bill out of the Vietnam draft - was far more than an auto dealer. In the nationally prominent fount of vice and corruption that was Hot Springs from the 1920s to the 1980s (its barely concealed casinos generated more income than Las Vegas well into the 1960s), the uncle's Buick agency and other businesses and real estate were widely thought to be facades for illegal gambling, drug money laundering and other ventures, in which Raymond was a partner. He was a minion of the organized crime overlord who controlled the American Middle South for decades, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello or "Mafia Kingfish" as his biographer John Davis called him.
Acccording to Capitol Hill Blue news service, a female student at the University of Arkansas will later claim that then-law school instructor Bill Clinton tried to prevent her from leaving his office during a conference. She says he groped her and forced his hand inside her blouse. She complains to her faculty advisor who confronts Clinton, but Clinton claims the student ''came on'' to him. The student leaves the school shortly after the incident. Reached at her home in Texas in the 1990s, the former student confirms the incident, but declines to go on the record with her account. Several former students at the University also confirm the incident.
1976
Bill Clinton is elected attorney general of Arkansas.
Two Indonesian billionaires come to Arkansas. Mochtar Riady and Liem Sioe Liong are close to Suharto. Riady is looking for an American bank to buy. Finds Jackson Stephens with whom he forms Stephens Finance. Stephens will broker the arrival of BCCI to this country and steer BCCI's founder, Hassan Abedi, to Bert Lance.
Riady's teen-age son is taken on as an intern by Stephens Inc. He later says he was "sponsored" by Bill Clinton.
1977
Hillary Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm.
Apparently because of pressure from Indonesia, Riady withdraws his bid to buy Lance's 30% share of the National Bank of Georgia. Instead, a BCCI front man buys the shares and Abedi moves to secretly take over Financial General - later First American Bankshares -- later the subject of the only BCCI-connected scandal to be prosecuted in the US.
1978
Clinton is elected governor.
The Clintons and McDougals buy land in the Ozarks for $203,000 with mostly borrowed funds. The Clintons get 50% interest with no cash down. The 203 acre plot, known as Whitewater, is fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. The Washington Post will report later that some purchasers of lots, many of them retirees, "put up houses or cabins, others slept in vans or tents, hoping to be able to live off the land." More than half of the purchasers will lose their plots thanks to the sleazy form of financing used.
Two months after commencing the Whitewater scam, Hillary Clinton invests $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she has a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million.
Governor Clinton appoints Jim McDougal an economic development advisor.
Bill Clinton's mother hangs out at the race track with mobsters and other local figures, including Dan Lasater who breeds race horses in Kentucky and Florida and has a box at the track next to hers. Mrs. Clinton introduces Lasater to Roger Clinton.
More than a few Little Rock insiders believe Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Vince Foster.
Roger Clinton develops a four-gram a day cocaine habit, getting his stuff from New York and Medellin suppliers, based (as one middleman will later testify) on "who his brother was." Sharlene Wilson is one of his dealers. Dan Lasater will give Roger work and loan him $8,000 to pay off a drug debt.
According to her later allegations, Juanita Broaddrick, a volunteer in Clinton's gubernatorial campaign, is raped by Clinton and her lip almost bitten off. Hospital nurses report Broaddrick's incident as a rape but the report along with photos have since disappeared.
According to Roger Morris in Partners in Power, a young woman lawyer in Little Rock will later claim that she was accosted by Clinton this year and that when she recoiled he forced himself on her, biting and bruising her. "Deeply affected by the assault, the woman decided to keep it all quiet for the sake of her own hard-won career and that of her husband. When the husband later saw Clinton at the 1980 Democratic Convention, he delivered a warning. 'If you ever approach her,' he told the governor, 'I'll kill you.' Not even seeing fit to deny the incident, Bill Clinton sheepishly apologized and duly promised never to bother her again."
Paula Grober, Clinton's speech interpreter for the deaf is killed in a high-speed, no witness, one-car crash. Has traveled extensively with Clinton since 1978
1979
A legal secretary will later say that Clinton tried to force her into oral sex. She will tell Capitol Hill Blue news service in the 1990s that when she told her boyfriend, who was a lawyer and supporter of Clinton, about the incident, he told her to keep her mouth shut. "He said that people who crossed the governor usually regretted it and that if I knew what was good for me I'd forget that it ever happened," she says. "I haven't forgotten it. You don't forget crude men like that." She declines further interviewing.
Sharlene Wilson will testify in a 1990 federal drug probe that she began selling cocaine to Roger Clinton as early as this year. She will also tell reporters that she sold two grams of cocaine to Clinton's brother at the Little Rock nightclub Le Bistro, then witnessed Bill Clinton consume the drug. "I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall," Wilson reveals to the London Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in 1995. "He was so messed up that night, he slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat there like a complete idiot." Wilson also describes gatherings at Little Rock's Coachman's Inn between 1979 and 1981, where she saw Clinton using cocaine "quite avidly" with friends. Drug prosecutor Jean Duffey will say that she has no doubt that Wilson was telling the truth.
1980s
According to later sworn testimony by Arkansas trooper Larry Patterson, Governor Clinton has oral sex with a woman in a car parked outside Chelsea Clinton's elementary school.
Governor Clinton appoints Web Hubbell to head a new state ethics commission. First task: to weaken ethics legislation currently under consideration by exempting the governor from some of its most rigorous provisions.
Arkansas becomes a major center of gun-running, drugs and money laundering. The IRS warns other law enforcement agencies of the state's "enticing climate." According to Clinton biographer Roger Morris, operatives go into banks with duffel bags full of cash, which bank officers then distribute to tellers in sums under $10,000 so they don't have to report the transaction.
Sharlene Wilson, according to investigative reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, flies cocaine from Mena to a pickup point in Texas. Other drugs, she and others say, are stuffed into chickens for shipping around the country. Wilson also serves as "the lady with the snow" at "toga parties" attended, she reports, by Bill Clinton.
According to Wilson,"I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, O.K.? And I worked at a club called Le Bistro's, and I met Roger Clinton there, Governor Bill Clinton, a couple of his state troopers that went with him wherever he went. Roger Clinton had come up to me and he had asked me could I give him some coke, you know, and asked for my one-hitter, which a one-hitter is a very small silver device,O.K., that you stick up into your nose and you just squeeze it and a snort of cocaine will go up in there.And I watched Roger hand what I had given him to Governor Clinton, and he just kind of turned around and walked off."
Investor's Business Daily would later write, "Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas and Little Rock talk show host who said she had an affair with then-Gov. Clinton in 1983, told the London Sunday Telegraph that he once came over to her house with a bag full of cocaine. ''He had all the equipment laid out, like a real pro.'' In the 1990s, Genifer Flowers tells Sean Hannity's WABC talk radio show: "He smoked marijuana in my presence and and offered me the opportunity to snort cocaine if I wanted to. I wasn't into that. Bill clearly let me know that he did cocaine. And I know people that knew he did cocaine. He did tell me that when he would use a substantial amount of cocaine that his head would itch so badly that he would become self conscious at parties where he was doing this. Because all he wanted to do while people were talking to him is stand around and scratch his head. ...."
Two Arkansas state troopers will swear under oath that they have seen Clinton ''under the influence'' of drugs when he was governor. Sharlene Wilson is a bartender who ended up serving time on drug crimes and cooperating with drug investigators. She told a federal grand jury she saw Clinton and his younger brother ''snort'' cocaine together in 1979. Jack McCoy, a Democratic state representative and Clinton supporter, told the Sunday Telegraph that he could ''remember going into the governor's conference room once and it reeked of marijuana.'' Historian Roger Morris, in his book ''Partners in Power,'' quotes several law enforcement officials who say they had seen and knew of Clinton's drug use. One-time apartment manager Jane Parks claims that in 1984 she could listen through the wall as Bill and Roger Clinton, in a room adjoining hers, discussed the quality of the drugs they were taking. R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of American Spectator magazine, has tried to track down rumors that Clinton suffered an overdose at one point.
Hillary Clinton makes a $44,000 profit on a $2,000 investment in a cellular phone franchise deal that involves taking advantage of the FCC's preference for locals, minorities and women. The franchise is almost immediately flipped to the cellular giant, McCaw.
A drug pilot brings a Cessna 210 full of cocaine into eastern Arkansas where he is met by his pick-up: a state trooper in a marked police car. "Arkansas," the pilot will recall years later, "was a very good place to load and unload."
VINCE FOSTER
According to his wife, security operative Jerry Parks delivers large sums of money from Mena airport to Vince Foster at a K-Mart parking lot. Mrs. Parks discovers this when she opens her car trunk one day and finds so much cash that she has to sit on the trunk to close it again. She asks her husband whether he is dealing drugs, and he allegedly explains that Foster paid him $1,000 for each trip he took to Mena. Parks said he didn't "know what they were doing, and he didn't care to know. He told me to forget what I'd seen.". . . .Later Evans-Pritchard will write, "Foster was using him as a kind of operative to collect sensitive information on things and do sensitive jobs. Some of this appears to have been done on behalf of Hillary Clinton. . . Foster told him that Hillary wanted it done. Now, my understanding . . . is that she wanted to know how vulnerable he would be in a presidential race on the question of -- how shall I put it? -- his appetites."
Hillary Clinton quietly lobbies on behalf of the Contras and against groups and individuals opposing them.
Dan Lasater's parties become known around Little Rock for the availability of cocaine and women.
According to Roger Clinton's landlady, Jane Parks, Bill Clinton is a frequent visitor to the apartment which shared a wall with her office. She notes drug use and young girls at gatherings Bill Clinton attends.
Judy Gibbs, a model and call girl who appeared in Penthouse magazine, runs a powerful house of prostitution in Fordyce with her sister Sharon. They also blackmail some of their more powerful clients. Both her family and one of Clinton's bodyguards will later link Judy Gibbs to the governor. She decides to cooperate with police in an investigation of Arkansas cocaine trafficking, but is burned to death inside her home from a fire of undetermined origin. In 1999, Newsmax will report, "[Former Clinton bodyguard Barry] Spivey had become something of a mystery man, who insisted on meeting [Paula Jones investigator] Rick Lambert on a deserted road nestled deep in the Arkansas backwoods. The Jones investigator admitted he was none too comfortable with the situation. Spivey shared a story about a conversation he had with Clinton while on a flight over southeast Arkansas. The trooper noticed a blackened patch amidst the greenery below that, surprisingly, Clinton recognized. That patch was all that was left of an estate that had burned to the ground in the mid-80s. According to the trooper, Clinton began reminiscing about rumors of his involvement with the woman of the house, a onetime "Penthouse pet." Her husband, Spivey said, was involved in a pornography ring. Clinton explained to Spivey, 'You know that mansion just burned down right on top of them.' Years later, Spivey remains struck by one thing: the eerie expression that crossed Clinton's face as he spoke those words. ...."
The sudden and/or violent deaths of persons connected in some way to the Clinton machine now number over 30. Since most of these deaths -- like much else in this article -- have been at best shoddily investigated by public officials, it is impossible to determine which are the result of foul play and which are coincidental. Barbara Wise is a case in point. This woman, whose partially nude body was found in the Commerce Department, has been described by some as being a highly disturbed person whose death may be totally unrelated to the Clinton scandals. Similarly, according to some news reports, a business figure, perhaps with intelligence ties, cancelled at the last minute his seat on the ill-fated Ron Brown plane. This same businessman died later in the crash of TWA 800. Coincidence or unsolved mystery?
In cases of foul play, readers are warned not to leap to conclusions as to motivation or potential perpetrators. For example, if Vincent Foster was killed rather than committing suicide, it may not have been because of the shady dealings at the White House but because public investigations of these shady dealings threatened to expose peripheral criminality such as past money laundering, drug trafficking, or illegal intelligence activities.
1980
The husband of a Little Rock attorney warns Clinton at the Democratic Convention that if he approaches his wife again, he'll kill him. Clinton apologizes and agrees to leave the woman alone.
Bill Clinton loses re-election as governor. He will win two years later. Larry Nichols will tell the George Putman Show in 1998 that he had met with Clinton and Jackson Stephen's brother Witt and that Witt had told Clinton that the Stephens were ready to back him for another run at the governorship but that he had to "dry out on the white stuff."
There are reports that following his loss, Clinton ended up in the hospital for a drug overdose. Journalist R. Emmett Tyrrell later asked emergency room workers at the University of Arkansas Medical Center if they could confirm the incident. He didn't get a flat ''no'' from the hospital staff. One nurse said, ''I can't talk about that.'' Another said she feared for her life if she spoke of the matter. Newsmax will report: "Dr. Sam Houston, a respected Little Rock physician and once a doctor for Hillary's cantankerous father, Hugh Rodham, says it is well known in Little Rock medical circles that Clinton was brought to a Little Rock hospital for emergency treatment for an apparent cocaine overdose. According to Houston, who told us he spoke to someone intimately familiar with the details of what happened that night, Clinton arrived at the hospital with the aid of a state trooper. Hillary Clinton had been notified by phone and had instructed the hospital staff that Clinton's personal physician would be arriving soon. When Mrs. Clinton arrived, she told both of the resident physicians on duty that night that they would never practice medicine in the United States if word leaked out about Clinton's drug problem. Reportedly, she pinned one of the doctors up against the wall, both hands pressed against his shoulders, as she gave her dire warning."
According to Jim McDougal's later account, he and Henry Hamilton, ``developed a system to pass money to Clinton,'' then governor of Arkansas. ``I considered it just another way of helping to take care of Bill. A contractor agreed to pad my monthly construction bill by $2,000. The contractor put the figure on his invoice as a cost for gravel or culvert work. After I paid the full amount ... the contractor reimbursed me the $2,000. I turned the money over to Henry to give to Clinton. Once, after I handed Henry his latest consignment of 20 hundred-dollar bills to relay to the governor's office, he turned the bills over and over in one hand, like a magician. Henry grinned. `You know,' he said, `Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First had Cromwell. Clinton could profit from these examples if he crosses us.'"
1981
Hillary Clinton writes Jim McDougal: "If Reagonomics works at all, Whitewater could become the Western Hemisphere's Mecca."
Major drug trafficker Barry Seal, under pressure from the Louisiana cops, relocates his operations to Mena, Arkansas. Seal is importing as much as 1,000 pounds of cociane a month from Colombia according to Arkansas law enforcement officials. He will claim to have made more than $50 million out of his operations. Later, as an informant, he will testify that during this period As an informant Seal testified that in 1980-81, before moving his operation to Arkansas, he made approximately 60 trips to Central America and brought back 18,000 kilograms. In 1996 the Progressive Review will report: "The London Telegraph has obtained some of the first depositions in ex-CIA contract flyer Terry Reed's suit against Clinton's ex-security chief - and now a high- paid FEMA director - Buddy Young. According to the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "Larry Patterson, an Arkansas state trooper, testified under oath that there were 'large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns.' The subject was discussed repeatedly in Clinton's presence by state troopers working on his security detail, he alleged. Patterson said the governor 'had very little comment to make; he was just listening to what was being said.'"
Mena state police investigator Russell Welch will later describe the airport, pointing to one hanger he says is owned by a man who "doesn't exist in history back past a safe house in Baltimore in 1972." Another is owned by someone who "smuggled heroin through Laos back in the seventies." Still another is "owned by a guy who just went bankrupt. So what's he do? Flies to Europe for more money." Welch points to a half dozen Fokker aircraft parked on an apron, noting that "the DEA's been tracking those planes back and forth to Columbia for a while now."
1982
A DEA report uncovered by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will cite an informant claiming that a key Arkansas figure and backer of Clinton "smuggles cocaine from Colombia, South America, inside race horses to Hot Springs."
IRS agent William Duncan and an Arkansas State Police investigator take their evidence concerning drug trafficking in Mena to US Attorney Asa Hutchinson. They ask for 20 witnesses to be subpoenaed before the grand jury. Hutchinson chooses only three. According to reporter Mara Leveritt, "The three appeared before the grand jury, but afterwards, two of them also expressed surprise at how their questioning was handled. One, a secretary at Rich Mountain Aviation, had given Duncan sworn statements about money laundering at the company, transcripts of which Duncan had provided to Hutchinson. But when the woman left the jury room, she complained that Hutchinson had asked her nothing about the crime or the sworn statements she'd given to Duncan. As Duncan later testified, 'She basically said that she was allowed to give her name, address, position, and not much else.' The other angry witness was a banker who had, in Duncan's words, 'provided a significant amount of evidence relating to the money-laundering operation.' According to Duncan, he, too, emerged from the jury room complaining 'that he was not allowed to provide the evidence that he wanted to provide to the grand jury.'"
Bill Clinton wins back the governorship.
1983
Mochtar Riady forms Lippo Finance & Investment in Little Rock. A non-citizen, Riady hires Carter's former SBA director, Vernon Weaver, to chair the firm. The launch is accomplished with the aid of a $2 million loan guaranteed by the SBA. Weaver uses Governor Clinton as a character reference to help get the loan guarantee. First loan goes to Little Rock Chinese restaurant owner Charlie Trie.
Riady also joins with Jackson Stephens to form United Pacific Trading.
State regulators warn McDougal's Madison Guarantee S&L to stop making imprudent loans. Gov. Clinton is also warned of the problem but takes no action.
According to a later account in the Tampa Tribune, planes flying drugs into Mena in coolers marked "medical supplies." are met by several people close to then-Governor Bill Clinton.
Although he is under investigation for drug activities, Dan Lasater's firm is given a piece of 14 state bond issues.
Judge David Hale's Capital Management Services startes making loans to state figures.
1984
Stevens and Riady buy a banking firm and change its name to Worthern Bank with Riady's 28-year-old son James as president. Other Worthen co-owners will eventually include BCCI investor Abdullah Taha Bakhish.
Jim McDougal tries to prevent state agencies from shutting down his S&L, which has been providing cash for the Whitewater operation.
The Washington Times will later quote an unnamed Clinton business associate who claims the governor used to "jog over to McDougal's office about once a month to pick up the [retainer] check for his wife."
Foreshadowing future Wall Street interest in Clinton, Goldman Sachs, Payne Webber, Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch all show up as financial backers of the governor. Also on the list: future king-maker Pam Harriman. But Bill Clinton's funders include not only some of the biggest corporate names ever to show an interest in the tiny state of Arkansas but some of the most questionable. A former US Attorney will later tell Roger Morris, "That was the election when the mob really came into Arkansas politics. . . It wasn't just Bill Clinton and it went beyond our old Dixie Mafia. . . This was eastern and west coast crime money that noticed the possibilities just like the legitimate corporations did."
Dan Lasater buys a ski resort in New Mexico for $20 million and uses Clinton's name (with permission) to promote it. Later, a US Customs investigative report will note that the resort is being used for drug operations and money laundering. Lasater also flies to Belize with his aide Patsy Thomasson to buy a 24,000 acre ranch. Among those present at the negotiations is the US Ambassador. The deal falls through because of the opposition of the Belize government.
A private contractor for Arkansas' prison system stops selling prisoners' blood to a Canadian broker and elsewhere overseas after admitting the blood might be contaminated with the AIDS virus or hepatitis. Sales of prisoners' blood in US are already forbidden.
Tens of thousands of dollars in mysterious checks begin moving through Whitewater's account at Madison Guaranty. Investigators will later suspect that McDougal was operating a check-kiting scheme to drain money from the S&L
Hot Springs police record Roger Clinton during a cocaine transaction. Roger says, "Got to get some for my brother. He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner." Roger is arrested while working at menial jobs for Arkansas "bond daddy" Dan Lasater.
Barry Seal estimates that he has earned between $60 and $100 million smuggling cocaine into the US, but with the feds closing in on him, Barry Seal flies from Mena to Washington in his private Lear Jet to meet with two members of Vice President George Bush's drug task force. Following the meeting, Seal rolls over for the DEA, becoming an informant. He collects information on leaders of the Medellin cartel while still dealing in drugs himself. The deal will be kept secret from investigators working in Louisiana and Arkansas. According to reporter Mara Leveritt, "By Seal's own account, his gross income in the year and a half after he became an informant - while he was based at Mena and while Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor in Fort Smith, 82 miles away - was three-quarters of a million dollars. Seal reported that $575,000 of that income had been derived from a single cocaine shipment, which the DEA had allowed him to keep. Pressed further, he testified that, since going to work for the DEA, he had imported 1,500 pounds of cocaine into the U.S. Supposed informant Seal will fly repeatedly to Colombia, Guatemala, and Panama, where he meets with Jorge Ochoa, Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, and Carlos Lehder - leaders of the cartel that at the time controlled an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States."
Ronald Reagan wants to send the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Contras. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis goes to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons "excess" and leaves them behind for the Contras.
Clinton bodyguard, state trooper LD Brown, applies for a CIA opening. Clinton gives him help on his application essay including making it more Reaganesque on the topic of the Nicaragua. According to Brown, he meets a CIA recruiter in Dallas whom he later identities as former member of Vice President Bush's staff. On the recruiter's instruction, he meets with notorious drug dealer Barry Seal in a Little Rock restaurant. Joins Seal in flight to Honduras with a purported shipment of M16s and a return load of duffel bags. Brown gets $2,500 in small bills for the flight. Brown, concerned about the mission, consults with Clinton who says, "Oh, you can handle it, don't sweat it." On second flight, Brown finds cocaine in a duffel bag and again he seeks Clinton's counsel. Clinton says to the conservative Brown, "Your buddy, Bush, knows about it" and of the cocaine, "that's Lasater's deal."
Clinton wins reelection.
1985
Roger Clinton pleads guilty to cocaine distribution but cops a plea on more serious charges with a promise to cooperate. He will serve a short prison term.
A relative of Bill Clinton is raped. Wayne Dumond is arrested and imprisoned in the case. While awaiting sentencing, Dumond himself is sexually assaulted and castrated by two masked men. A local sheriff, later sentenced to 160 years for extortion and drug dealing, displays Dumond's testicles in a jar on his desk under a sign that read, "That's what happens to people who fool around in my county." A parole board, upon receiving new evidence of Dumond's innocence, will vote to release him after 4 1/2 years in prison. Governor Clinton -- according to the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette -- stages a "romping, stomping fit" and blocks the release.
Mrs. Clinton is put on a $2,000 a month retainer by Madison Guaranty.. McDougal will later write in his book that the payments were in lieu of his earlier system of passing money to Bill Clinton. Ms. Clinton will later claim not to have received any retainer nor to have been deeply involved with Madison. Subsequent records show, however, that she represented Madison before the state securities department. After the revelation, she says, "For goodness sakes, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks."
Clinton establishes the Arkansas Development Finance Authority that will be used, in the words of one well-connected Arkansan as "his own political piggy bank." Though millions of dollars are funneled to Clinton allies, records of repayments will be hazy or non-existent. AFDA brags to prospective out-of-state corporations of Arkansas' anti-union climate. Dan Lasater is a major underwriter and gets a $30 million bond deal for state police radios even as the governor's stepbrother Roger is making a bargain with the US attorney to testify against Lasater in a drug case.
Arkansas state pension funds -- deposited in Worthen by Governor Bill Clinton -- suddenly lose 15% of their value because of the failure of high risk, short-term investments and the brokerage firm that bought them. The $52 million loss is covered by a Worthen check written by Jack Stephens in the middle of the night, an insurance policy, and the subsequent purchase over the next few months of 40% of the bank by Mochtar Riady. Clinton and Worthen escape a major scandal.
Lippo executive and Chinese native John Huang becomes active in Lippo's operations in Arkansas.
China Resources pays for a Lippo-organized trip to Asia by Gov. Clinton, according to a later FBI inteview with John Huang.
Mochtar and James Riady engineer the takeover of the First National Bank of Mena in a town of 5,000 with few major assets beyond a Contra supply base, drug running and money-laundering operations.
Terry Reed is asked to take part in Operation Donation, under which planes and boats needed by the Contras "disappear," allowing owners to claim insurance. Reed has been a Contra operative and CIA asset working with Felix Rodriguez, the Contra link to the CIA and then-Vice President Bush's office. Reed later claims he refused, but that his plane was removed while he was away.
Park on Meter, a parking meter manufacturer in Russellville, Arkansas, receives the first industrial development loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority in 1985. Some suspect that POM is doing a lot more than making parking meters -- specifically that it has secret federal contracts to make components of chemical and biological weapons and devices to carry them on C-130s for the Contras. The company later denies the Contra connection although it will admit having secret military contracts. Web Hubbell is the company's lawyer. Right next to POM, on land previously owned by it, is an Army reserve chemical warfare company.
A series of checks to Clinton and his campaign are endorsed and deposited in Madison S&L. One of the checks -- a cashiers check in the amount of $3,000 -- has the name of a 24-year-old college student on it. When informed of this in 1993, the then-student, Ken Peacock, will deny having made any such donation.
Whitewater fails to file corporate tax returns for this year.
Asa Hutchinson leaves the US Attorney's office to make an unsuccessful bid for US Senate. According to police sources, Hutchinson had been aware of what was happening at Mena and the investigation into it, but did nothing. Hutchinson is replaced by Mike Fitzhugh who is reluctant to let investigators Russell Welch of the state police and William Duncan of the IRS present evidence of money-laundry to a grand jury.
Jim McDougal sets up a land deal called Castle Grande.
1986
Journalist Evans-Pritchard will describe the Arkansas of this period as a "major point for the transshipment of drugs" and "perilously close to becoming a 'narco-republic' -- a sort of mini-Columbia within the borders of the United States." There is "an epidemic of cocaine, contaminating the political establishment from top to bottom," with parties "at which cocaine would be served like hors d'oeuvres and sex was rampant." Clinton attends some of these events.
A Federal Home Loan Bank Board audit describes Madison as financially reckless, rife with conflicts and on the brink of collapse. It says that the S&L's records are so poor that examiners often could not discover the "real nature" of transactions.
Capital Management Services Inc., owned by David Hale, makes an SBA-approved loan of $300,000 to Susan McDougal, sole owner of an advertising firm called Master Marketing. The loan will never be repaid.
Dan Lasater, Arkansas bond don who is close to Clinton, pleads guilty to cocaine distribution charges. The case also involves Clinton step brother Roger, who testifies against Lasater in a plea agreement. Both Lasater and Roger Clinton will serve brief prison terms. While Lasater is in prison his affairs will be run by Patsy Thomasson, who later becomes a White House aide.
January 17: Over the objections of investigators Russell Welch of the state police and Bill Duncan of the IRS, the US Attorney for wesstern Arkansas drops a money laundering and drug case gainst Arkansas associates of Barry Seal.
BARRY SEAL FOLLOWING HIS MURDER
Seal is scheduled to testify at the trial of Jorge Ochoa Vasques. But on February 19, shortly before the trial is to begin, Seal is murdered in Baton Rouge gangland style by three Colombian hitmen armed with machine guns who attack while he seated behind the wheel of his white Cadillac in Baton Rouge, La. The Colombians, connected with the Medellin drug cartel, are tried and convicted. Upon hearing of Seal's murder, one DEA agent says, "There was a contract out on him, and everyone knew it. He was to have been a crucial witness in the biggest case in DEA history."
Eight months after the murder, Seal's cargo plane is shot down over Nicaragua. It is carrying ammunition and other supplies for the Contras from Mena. One crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, survives.
The attorney general of Louisiana tells US Attorney General Ed Meese that drug trafficker Barry Seal has smuggled drugs into the US worth $3-$5 billion.
Whitewater fails to file corporate tax returns for this year.
James Riady resigns as president of Worthen Bank.
Clinton is reelected governor.
1987
According to the McDougals, the Whitewater files are transferred to the Clintons. In the 1992 campaign, the Clintons will say they can not find the records.
Clinton gives Arkansas Traveler awards to Contra operatives Adolpho and Mario Calero and John Singlaub.
Two boys, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, are killed in Saline County and left on a railroad track to be run over by a train The medical examiner will initially rule the deaths accidental, saying that the boys were unconscious and in a deep sleep due to marijuana. The finding will be punctured by dogged investigators whose efforts are repeatedly blocked by law enforcement officials. Ultimately, the bodies will be exhumed and another autopsy will be performed, which finds that Henry had been stabbed in the back and Ives beaten with a rifle butt. Although no one will ever be charged, the trail will lead into the penumbra of the Dixie Mafia and the Arkansas political machine. Some believe the boys died because they accidentally intercepted a drug drop, but other information obtained by the Progressive Review suggests the drop may have dispensed not drugs but cash, gold and platinum -- part of a series of sorties through which those working with US intelligence were being reimbursed. According to one version, the boys were blamed in order to cover up the theft of the drop by persons within the Dixie Mafia and Arkansas political machine. Ives mother will later charge that high state and federal officials participated in a coverup: "I firmly believe my son and Don Henry were killed because they witnessed a drug drop by an airplane connected to the Mena drug smuggling routes."
Prosecutor Jean Duffey will later tell talk show host in answer to whether law enforcement people were involved in the train death murders: "I believe the law enforcement agents were connected to some very high political people because they have never been brought to justice and I don't think they ever will be. I think they are protected to avoid exposing the connection...There have been several murders of potential witnesses. Anyone who could have solved this murder many years ago has been systematically eliminated."
Nine persons reportedly having information on the Ives-Henry murders will end up dead themselves. Keith McKaskle will express fear for his life because of the "railroad track thing" and tell his parents good-bye before his murder. An inmated will report being offered $4,000 to kill McKaskle. A suspect in the Ives-Henry murders will die in what initially is thought to have been a robbery but turns out to have been a set-up. Boonie Bearden vanishes without a trace. It is rumored he knows exactly what had happened at the tracks. James Milam is found decapitated; nonetheless, the state medical examiner, Fahmy Malak - who also called the Ives-Henry deaths accidental -- will declare the death to be of natural causes. Jeff Rhodes will be shot, burned, and have his hands and feet partially sawed off.
Terry Reed's plane is returned but, according to his account, he is asked not report it because it might have to be "borrowed" again. Reed later says that he had become aware that the Contra operation also involved drug running and had gotten cold feet. He also believed that large sums of drug money were being laundered by leading Arkansas financiers. He went to Felix Rodriguez and told him he was quitting. Reed was subsequently charged with mail fraud for having allegedly claimed insurance on a plane that was in fact hidden in a hanger in Little Rock. The head of Clinton's Swiss Guard, Capt. Buddy Young, will claim to have been walking around the North Little Rock Airport when "by an act of God" a gust of wind blew open the hangar door and revealed the Piper Turbo Arrow.
Whitewater fails to file corporate tax returns for this year.
1988
Conservative Democrats begin a series of nearly 100 meetings held at the home of Pam Harriman to plot strategy for the takeover of the Democratic Party. Donors cough up $1,000 to attend and Harriman eventually raises $12 million for her kind of Democrat. The right-wing Dems will eventually settle on Bill Clinton as their presidential choice.
Charles Black, a prosecutor for Polk County, which includes Mena, meets with Governor Clinton and asks for assistance in a probe of illegal activities. "His response," Mr. Black will tell CBS News later, "was that he would get a man on it and get back to me. I never heard back."
Following pressure from then-Arkansas Rep. Bill Alexander, the General Accounting Office opens a probe in April 1988; within four months, the inquiry is shut down by the National Security Council, according to a later report by Micah Morrison of the Wall Street Journal. Several congressional subcommittee inquiries sputter and stop.
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations issues a report that describes the seriousness of the Barry Seal disaster. That report says, "Law enforcement officials were furious that their undercover operation was revealed and agents' lives jeopardized because one individual in the U.S. government - Lt. Col. Oliver North- decided to play politics with the issue . . . Associates of Seal, who operated aircraft service businesses at the Mena, Arkansas airport, were also targets of grand jury probes into narcotics trafficking. Despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges and over the strong protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped."
1989
Madison S&L is closed by federal regulators at an eventual cost to taxpayers of $47 million.
FDIC hires Webster Hubbell of the Rose firm to press its case concerning Madison. Rose law firm, now representing FDIC, sues an accounting firm for $60 million, blaming its audits for causing millions of dollars in losses to the S&L. Although the job earns Rose $400,000 in fees and expenses the accounting firm will eventually settle by paying the government just $1 million.
A US Senate subcommittee calls the available evidence about Mena sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges. But the feds scrap a five year probe of Mena and interfere in local investigations, and the state police are taken off the case. Clinton refuses a request from one of his own prosecutors to pursue the matter.
What will later be known as the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy begins on the left as a group of progressive students at the University of Arkansas form the Arkansas Committee to look into Mena, drugs, money laundering, and Arkansas politics.
Dan Short, a bank president, is abducted from his home in Benton Co., Arkansas and allegedly forced to open the State Bank in Noel, MO were $71,000 is allegedly taken. Three days before his abduction, he had told friends that he had been laundering drug money and was in trouble.
posted on July 10, 2003 01:03:04 PM new
And what kind of light is Bush in? It's surely not the light of a halo hanging over his head. Get over Clinton. Maybe you guys would fare better if you looked at the "here and now" rather then the "done and did". Or, is there something you are afraid to "see"?
posted on July 10, 2003 01:19:29 PM new
Bear - Cheryl has got a point . Why, three years later are you still trying to turn people off of Clinton. Are the Repubs hoping that if you keep heaping dirt on Bill no one will remember that he has an intelligent politically savvy wife that stands every chance of taking the office when she decides she wants it?
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
- Thomas Edison
posted on July 10, 2003 01:43:52 PM new
I think some of it (maybe not in this case) has to do with people trying to lay blame on Bush for things that previous administrations did. Such as pulling federal funds if the speed limit isn't adjusted and the NAFTA issues that are not a good idea in my opinion. True Bush has plenty of problems on his plate right now but he himself is not the reason for all things bad regardless of how some may feel. There is plenty of stinky politcs in both parties to destroy us all.
posted on July 10, 2003 02:18:07 PM newTrue Bush has plenty of problems on his plate right now but he himself is not the reason for all things bad regardless of how some may feel. There is plenty of stinky politcs in both parties to destroy us all.
No doubt about that...so I think we should overlook the fact that we were told intentional lies about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear material. Lies which caused some members of congress to vote for authorization (John Rockefeller said as much last night on Hardball) and which eventually led to the deaths of American soldiers. While we're at it, let's overlook the fact that Klinton lied too..about his..um...sex life. Nobody's perfect.
___________________________________
What luck for the leaders that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
posted on July 10, 2003 02:44:01 PM new
I don't think Clinton was perfect. He lied through his teeth over the whole Monica thing. I didn't agree with some of his policies. I didn't agree with the whole NAFTA thing, either. But, that is past and spending the time and energy laying blame instead of spending that time and energy fixing the problems is a waste. It's like blaming your ex for the car breaking down 10 years after your divorce. It's pointless.
posted on July 10, 2003 02:58:52 PM new
What a laugh tomyou! If the Clinton administration left Bush with all these problems, why is he off to war with 2 countries instead of cleaning up the mess left to him? Clinton helped the U.S. clean-up from the Reagan/Bush years. Remember the debt? For that alone, he's a saint, but, like Cheryl says, he's history along with the rest of them.
posted on July 10, 2003 03:03:42 PM new
I have a question on the arguements against NAFTA. The big arguement seems to be that NAFTA has enticed more US Companies to move their manufacturing south of the border thus taking job in specific areas. Thus damaging the economy of said area.... Am I right so far?
OK now - lets say those jobs and those factories stayed in the US. In order to actually cover costs, they would have to increase the selling price of the product, which in todays economy would mean a drastic drop in sales since most of the items being produced in the maquiladoras are considered "luxuries". Drastic drop in sales results in drastic drop in income which results in lay-offs, firings or complete shuts downs.
At least when the items are being produced in Mexico they are still generating money circulation thru the american economy, keeping retailers afloat (most of whom would also be adversly affected by increased prices), truckers on the road, etc as well as providing jobs and support systems on the other side of the border which helps to reduce illegal immigration.
I am not seeing the evil in NAFTA. If the loss of jobs in the manufacturing field is the big arguement - it just doesn't fly with me, What are the other arguements?
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
- Thomas Edison
posted on July 10, 2003 03:18:50 PM new
"NAFTA’s devastating impact on North American Workers: Canadian Workers have lost more than 137,000 highly paid industrial jobs. U.S. workers’ job losses exceed 600,000 to date.
There are documented cases of workers who have lost their higher paying jobs due to trade, being thrown into a labor market that paid significantly lower wages. Public Citizen, a watchdog group, reported that there were an estimated 69,000 jobs in the high paid motor vehicle industries that were lost due to trade with Mexico in 1996. This same year, many other manufacturing facilities, such as Zenith Television,, and Thompson Consumer Electronics have closed down American plants and opened shop in Mexico. During this same year, there has been an increase of 7% in temporary services employment. Temporary services jobs often are low paid with little or no benefits, and have become a means to cheaply replace more expensive workers that work directly for companies. The department of Labor had certified that 127,000 workers had lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada, yet only 5,300 workers received NAFTA transitional adjustment assistance. It can certainly argued that many jobs were created by NAFTA, but this means little to the individuals who were forced to find jobs in a market that paid lower wages for the same skills they were once paid more for.
Companies have also used threats to move to Mexico when bargaining with workers. NAFTA Labor Secretariat Professor Kate Bronfenbrunner of Cornell University reported that over one half of companies surveyed had used the threat of moving to Mexico when confronted with union organization attempts.
Mexican workers are being exploited. They continue to be forced to live in shacks constructed of scrap wood and metal without electricity and running water while corporations rake in higher and higher profits.
The U.S.-Mexican border has become a virtual cesspool. It has become a breeder of malaria and hepatitis and the Rio Grand is being referred to as a "2000-mile long Love Canal".
Manufacturing facilities in the Maquiladoras continue to pump millions of tons of pollutants into the air, ground and water and millions of gallons raw sewage are discharged daily into the waterways. Environmental controls are virtually non-existent
It is fair to say that consumer gains occurred to some extent. But there are also indications that consumer gains were less than they should have been. For example, many American auto plants have moved to Mexico to utilize labor costs that were 1/11 the average U.S. cost. But as they began producing the same models formerly made in the U.S., they continued selling these models for the same prices as before. Their cost savings have clearly not made their way to consumers.
NAFTA has failed in a number of ways. The environmental provision and Mexican labor protection provisions of the agreement did not produce the results that they intended. Trade adjustment assistance has not materialized to an acceptable extent. Mexican labor did not gain as predicted, but rather, suffered losses."
Edited to add: The above are excerpts from many NAFTA information websites.
Cheryl
[ edited by CBlev65252 on Jul 10, 2003 03:27 PM ]
posted on July 10, 2003 05:21:19 PM new
WEll kraft if youd would ever read a post BEFORE you already have your mind made up about it you might find yourself learning something. I voted for Clinton and he was a good president, however as with all presidents there was some things that happened in his adminstration that didn't work out as planned and people are blaming Bush on the two expamles I gave. That was a direct answer to the question Cheryl had. Feel free to read whatever you like into the statement, (and it appears you did so before even reading it and putting into context).hell lets have an IF party while we are at it And if clinton would have targeted bin laden a little better maybe 9-11 would not have happened either. He was targeted and due to a delay in the command chain the target was not authorized fast enough. And If bush would have acted faster with some of his information maybe 9-11 would not have happened, looks like signs were out there and the chain of command again delayed us. However if you look at it that way Bush did take action on signs in Iraq and now look at your view on that.If he did nothing and another 9-11 happened then what . If if if if if, If , if and buts were candy and nuts as they say.... Cry me a river but democrat or republican nobody is straying to far from the almighty dollar on the hill. It is not a question of which party is going to screw you but which one will screw you less or if nothing else at least send flowers
posted on July 10, 2003 05:36:32 PM new
Did Clinton's genitalia ever kill anyone?
BIG DEAL!!!!
What is it with these ‘sex laws’ in America.
Bear, Are you now or have you ever been one that engages in oral sex?
The ‘right’ seems to have an unhealthy fixation with sex.
On the military thing.
I agree bear, US need to spend more on military because it now has more enemies than ever.
(It has ‘brought them on’!)
I hear that US has military presence in 136 countries. Hmm!!
The bigger they are the harder they fall.
It’s just a matter of time, unless ALL ‘potentials’ are brought down and kept down.
Don’t forget to get their extended families too, because they will be ‘pissed’.
From US’ stance, justification not required.
You may think it a ‘new nation’ but you have an old ‘die hard’ regime. And die hard they just might do. Bear, take your ‘humanitarian aid’ and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
My condolence to America’s oppressed, Americans included.
posted on July 10, 2003 07:43:47 PM new
I find that while the demos continue to bash Pres Bush they become MORE defensive for Clinton.
The real problem I have with Clinton's (Bill & Hillary) is their inability to accept responsibility for the record number of scandals during his term in office and how he brainwashed so many American's into believing him. It isn't something you expect from an American president.
posted on July 10, 2003 08:22:22 PM new
Actually, I was siding with you tomyou, but it didn't come off that way. Your explanation is right imo, but the joke of how Clinton left Bush with such a mess is one some people are buying. That's funny to me.
