posted on August 12, 2003 05:38:59 PM new
By questioning every move this administration makes. By questioning every word that comes out of our so-called leader's mouth, we are pulling for America. No, better than that, we are protecting America.
Cheryl
Power to the people. Power to the people, right on. - John Lennon
posted on August 12, 2003 07:24:08 PM new
That's it, keep defending Clinton. after all he's the one that got us where we are today.
Clinton's Intelligence Scandals
In the weeks of uproar over sixteen words in President Bush’s State of the Union address, one thing becomes very clear: Bush is being punished by the liberal media for strategic boldness and a quick military victory on the ground. Neither of these was a strength of the Clinton presidency.
This became evident last week when NBC’s Katie Couric tried to press former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey over how CIA Director George Tenet should have looked over the dreaded Saddam-seeks-uranium sentence. Didn’t you vet Clinton addresses, she asked? Woolsey coolly replied that Clinton didn’t speak about intelligence in his first two January addresses to Congress. Furthermore, when Clinton launched the strike on Iraq in retaliation for Saddam’s attempt to kill former president Bush in the summer of 1993, "not only did I not vet the statement. I did not know the strike was going to occur until it was in the process of occurring. We hadn’t been invited into the meetings to make the assessments."
This was never one of the many Clinton scandals – but it should have been. Clinton’s usual military approach was to drop a few bombs, beat his breast publicly about actions that did nothing but kill janitors in enemy buildings, and never, ever tolerate an American casualty. And yet these meaningless military mini-campaigns were roundly celebrated by the press. Reporters refused to question the quality of his intelligence – or whether he actually even asked for it.
When American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Osama bin Laden in 1998, CBS blamed Congress for "drastic cutbacks." When Clinton responded by attacking targets in Afghanistan and Sudan three days after admitting the Lewinsky affair, Ted Koppel found it "unthinkable" to question Clinton’s actions and mourned "the times we live in" that some people did not believe the White House line. No network anchor asked where Clinton received his intelligence – if any – even after it emerged that the alleged chemical-weapons site was a pharmaceutical factory, and the U.S. government paid damages to the Sudanese owner.
In 1999, Clinton dissembled in his State of the Union address: "We will defend our security wherever we are threatened, as we did this summer when we struck at Osama bin Laden’s network of terror." The August 16, 1999 U.S. News & World Report published an investigation by reporters Warren Strobel and Kevin Whitelaw that painted a different picture on the bombing at the Sudanese site of El Shifa. They found that "virtually everything the administration said publicly about El Shifa in the days after the attack has turned out to be wrong."And: "The decision to bomb El Shifa was made by fewer than a dozen top U.S. officials. This meant that experts on both Sudan and chemical weapons were not consulted about the government's evidence."
Do you remember the weeks of media frenzy after that U.S. News report came out? Calls for congressional investigations? Talk of "growing" intelligence scandals? Neither do I.
As General Katie Couric and the others pound President Bush daily on the quality of his leadership and the content of his character, just remember that in the Clinton era the State of the Union address was never an occasion to underline defense or intelligence matters. On average, Clinton spoke for about 5,000 words on domestic initiatives before he reached the national-security section.
The domestic section was often full of laughably dishonest sentences. "The era of big government is over" in 1996. Or this whopper from 1998: "We have the smallest government in 35 years, but a more progressive one." Foreign policy was no different. You could chortle at this Clinton boast from 1996: "North Korea has now frozen its dangerous nuclear weapons program." But about the only boast that would seem to require an intelligence review was his claim that "there is not a single Russian missile pointed at America’s children." Clinton liked that line so much he used it in 1995, and 1996.
Most of Clinton’s national-security sections stressed his utopian devotion to treaties – chemical weapons conventions, comprehensive nuclear test bans – though these never stopped Saddam. In 1996, Clinton claimed "As we remember what happened in the Japanese subway [a sarin gas attack], we can outlaw poison gas forever – if the Senate ratifies the Chemical Weapons Convention this year."
In stark contrast to the last president, George W. Bush took an enormous political risk and put an end to Saddam Hussein’s world-defying attempts to built weapons of mass destruction, and liberated Iraq from decades of tyranny. He put American soldiers in harm’s way for one of the most impressive military victories in history. For this, his honesty and character are questioned daily by the same media elite who found questions about Bill Clinton’s military honesty "unthinkable." How sickening.
posted on August 13, 2003 04:21:02 AM new
Do you have no words of your own or is it easier to borrow those of others? We get a lot of one liners from you and the rest is cut and paste, cut and paste. Here we go again. The best the right can do is blame Clinton. No wonder we can't move forward. The conservatives are too busy living in the past.
Cheryl
Power to the people. Power to the people, right on. - John Lennon
posted on August 13, 2003 07:11:54 AM new
"That's it, keep defending Clinton. after all he's the one that got us where we are today" -TXCLOD
That statement is not only historically inaccurate but incredibly stupid. The key words to what "got us where we are today" are listed below.
Turn off FOX News, pull the plug on those insipid, babbling baboons of tabloid radio and perhaps you can cut and paste {apparently your lone skill} your way out of your profound ignorance.
Anglo Iranian Oil Company
TP-AJAX
MI6
CIA
Mohammed Mossadeq
Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
Ruhollah Khomeini
posted on August 13, 2003 09:50:47 AM new
The lead topic on another political chatboard is titled, "Why Liberals Give Me Gas". The answer by the originator of the thread is because they are so "winded".
posted on August 13, 2003 11:38:46 AM new
Cheryl - The conservatives are too busy living in the past.
I'm very conservative and I don't feel like I'm living in the past when I bring up issues that concern Bill or Hillary. They are very much in our presence....today.
In a NY Times article today, Bill is shown to be supporting Gray Davis in is bid to keep his job. Calls Davis a lot to offer advice to him.
Hillary is presently a Senator and it's well known she may run in 2008 or maybe even in 2004. She's current news.
Now if they had been like most Presidents and their First Ladies...and gone off the political 'stage' that would be a different matter. They didn't...so we speak about them.
PLUS.....there have been, and always will be, posts about other past presidents and what we agreed with or disagreed with that occurred during their administrations. It's really nothing new. Just some are a little oversensitive, imo.
[ edited by Linda_K on Aug 13, 2003 11:42 AM ]
posted on August 14, 2003 04:12:29 AM new
Bill Clinton has a problem with pandering to different crowds.
On Hardball Chris Matthews reported that Bill Clinton gave a speech at the DLC to make George W Bush accountable for missleading the American people into the RUSH to war.
