So is it your assertion that the House, Senate and White House were more corrupt and incompetent during Bill Clinton’s presidency than they have been under George W. Bush’s?
At least Clinton had the decency to wait until after Rosty had been tried. Bush Daddy pulled a Gerald Ford and short-circuited the whole legal system, pardoning Cap Weinberger just before he went to trial, as well as five other Iran-Contra principals who had either pleaded guilty or were awaiting sentencing. Plus he threw in a pardon for Armand Hammer, who had already pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions, coincidentally just after Hammer contributed another $200,000 to Republican campaigns.
Still want to play this game?
Totally wrong. I see you’ve memorized the Republican talking-point: “law enforcement approach”. That one gets trotted out constantly. Problem is, it’s just not true. Clinton devloped the nation’s first anti-terrorism policy, appointed the first national coordinator of anti-terrorist efforts, tripled the budget of the FBI for counterterrorism and doubled overall funding for counterterrorism, detected and destroyed cells of Al Qaeda in over 20 countries, created a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines including 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine, foiled numerous terrorist plots, and sent anti-terrorism legislation to Congress (defeated by the Republicans), and issued an executive order to assassinate bin Laden. He also met frequently with his security council and with his anti-terrrorism advisor, something which Bush failed miserably at.
In addition, he had Richard Clarke developed a comprehensive plan to take out Al Qaeda. This was unfortunately at the end of his second term - as a lame-duck president, humiliated by Monica-gate, he decided not to launch a major counter-offensive in the final months of his presidency. Clarke tried aggressively to get the Bush Admin to continue to give priority to the issue, but we all know how that turned out…
You’re forgetting that after his response of “a few cruise missles”, as you call it, he was relentlessly castigated by the Republicans for “wagging the dog”. After the 9/11 attack, Bush pretty much had carte blanche to aggressively go after terrorism (by the way, did we catch Osama yet? :dubious: ), but Clinton had no such mandate from the country. Even so, as constrained as he was by public opinion, he STILL fought aggressively against terrorism.
You can stick your fingers in your ears and say, “I won’t listen to Richard Clarke, la, la, la”, but you’re forgetting that he started out under Reagan, and far from being a lackey for the Democrats, he was actually a seasoned veteran by the time of the Clinton administration.
It’s a silly game all the way around.
There will always be politicians who behave abominably, and they often leave a big mess to clean up, so to speak.
Nobody’s mentioned Buz Lukens yet, though he fucked a teenager. The same could be said about Mel Reynolds. Disgraced former congressman Austin Murphy was convicted of vote fraud a few years back for filling out absentee ballots for nursing home patients with dementia. And don’t get me started about Jim Traficant.
What does this all prove about politics, really? If you concentrate solely on scandal, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that both parties aren’t bastions of virtue. Therefore, if you have to vote for crooks and liars anyhow, better to do so for those who will push an agenda you believe in, and leave it to law enforcement and ethics regulators to handle the bad apples.
Which brings us right back to voting issues, the only smart way to vote.
Nixon left office in disgrace, and rightly so. That does not mean, though, that people who voted for him in 1972 should be ashamed of their vote. Had I been old enough to do so, I would have voted for him then, for the reason that McGovern had disastrous domestic and foreign policy positions.
The people who voted for him, for Murphy, for Reynolds, and for Bush all had good reasons for doing so, more or less.
Oh, and Evil One, you never answered my question: What would YOU have done to “respond”?
Specifically to the 1993 WTC attack? Besides pursuing it as a criminal case, I would take the opportunity to publically state that the United States considered the attack a political act of war and begin a foreign policy designed to reward those who fight terrorism and punish those who support it. In other words, what Bush did after 9/11. Essentially, I would have had a post-9/11 reaction short of actually going to war against the Taliban. I don’t think the 1993 attack was serious enough for us to have the moral authority we did post-9/11. But I would have made girding our collective loins a priority in spending and public policy.
Invade Iraq?
Gee, if we had done that in '93, we should be able to withdraw the troops any day now. 
Go ahead and dismss Clarke out of hand as a biased source because you do not like what he is saying. Ignore the facts that:
- he was appointed to the federal government by Bush 41
- he is the recognized top American expert on terrorism
Because if you acknowedge those facts, then your whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
It’s my assertion that your post was an example of anecdotal cherry-picking. I don’t know how you go about measuring the level of corruption in a given administration. The partisan sniping by both sides makes an objective assessment diffcult at best, and more likely impossible.
I don’t like it when either party controls both the legislative and executive branches of government. The Republicans controlled Congress for the last 6 years of Clinton’s 8-year presidency, so I see the two situations (Bush vs Clinton) as different sorts of animals. Maybe Clinton’s presidency was less corrupt (noting my caveat above). What would the situation have been like had the Dems been running Congress for the whole time? Who knows, but if Rostenkowski is any gauge, it wouldn’t have been pretty.
Absolutely. Party affiliation has nothing to do with it.
Or as I may have said (I probably did) they’re all liars and thieves, regardless of party. We all just pick what brand of horse shit we think is less stinky.
Or at least believed they had good reasons at the time, or believed in SOME of what they were saying at the time - Nobody really believes everything a politician says, so they vote for the one who at least says it the way they think it should be, on what they think is important (or pisses them off less?).
I am a Bush basher. No denial, no apology. But, when he initially went after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, he was doing exactly what I would have done, given the power and opportunity. I’m just sorry the old bastard wasn’t caught. I was even willing to cut some slack over the “book reading incident”. It’s a hell of a shock to be told your country was just attacked. It takes a moment to sink in. I saw the whole thing on the morning news, and even watching it, it didn’t seem real. I also have no complaint about Saddam and his lunatic sons being removed, even if I have isues with the way it was justified and accomplished - It should have been full UN sanction and formal charges for mass murder, war crimes, torture, genocide etc. Real hanging offenses with real meat to them.
But, we need to throw away the Talking Points nonsense (and the pundits/hacks/whores) and get real in this country. Slogans, memes, denials, talking points, spin, evasion etc are bullshit and we need to admit it on both sides of the aisle. Scandals happen. Corruption is a fact of life where ever there is power and money. Nobody is served if one side or the other falls back on “your guy did bla bla” or “you guys are worse”, or the old “you are just evil”. In a perfect world, the crooks and morons would be voted out and face jail time if the misdeeds were serious enough. Unfortunately, they either stay, or another crook or moron just takes their place.
Bush had a clear cut case. There was good intelligence that bin Laden was responsible. The Taliban were sheltering bin Laden and refused to cooperate. There was little serious opposition to that. But what country would you have invaded in 1993? Or would you have picked a random country that had nothing to do with al Qaeda, as Bush did with Iraq? By the way, how is that working out? Is world terrorism up or down since the Iraq invasion? Actually, you wouldn’t even have known for sure that al Qaeda was the right organization to go after, not in 1993. Most people didn’t even have any idea that al Qaeda even existed. So who would you have invaded?
Oh, in other words - exactly what Clinton did. Actually, Clinton did even more than what you just suggested.
I agree that we will very likely never convince one another that the Bush administration has presided over the most corrupt and incompetent period in political history. However, you don’t really believe that they are all exactly the same, do you? That’s just the tired old false equivalence meme being trotted out again. Objectively, there has to be a worst period for corruption and incompetence.
It is a fool’s errand, I’ll grant you that, but my previous post was not cherry picking, but was instead giving two examples out of many. I didn’t even mention Tom Delay or Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
Jack Abramoff is not some loose cannon running around doing dirty stuff that all just happens to benefit the GOP and Ralph Reed. I mean, how often do you get people who end up linked to a gangland style murder (Adam Kidan) praised in open session in congress (Bob Ney) and their eventual victim criticised in the congressional record? Meanwhile, Kidan’s partner, Abramoff, has an official investigation quashed by the Justice Department, when they suddenly demote the prosecutor,WiimATAKKQ5CTK9TAMTsifdmdQ5B)TAMfiRRQ7C(ymNf) days after he announces his investigation into the corruption?
And this isn’t even beginning to touch the pushing of the invasion of Iraq on false premises, then staffing the reconstruction with kids from the Heritage Foundation solely because of their professed ideology and not based on any experience, expertise or profession. We ended up misplacing 8 to 9 billion dollars of reconstruction money there.
No, my friend, cherry picking would be selecting certain items and leaving out others for the sake of misrepresenting the overall state of things. What I was doing was giving you the tip of the iceberg. And it’s all ice, baby.
But I will drop it, because I acknowledge that if you don’t see it that way yet, you probably won’t see it that way because of something I say. Because that would mean agreement with a liberal, who must therefore be aligned with MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, Gary Hart and Sean Penn.
P.S. This is not Bush bashing. This is corrupt Republican bashing. Bush is only a member of that set.
And here’s an example of what I was talking about regarding the lack of conscience on the right – the Republicans can’t even allow members of the Republican party to give speeches on how they should be for smaller government and spending restraint.
This in a story about how the Republicans held a “back the money truck up to the loading bay” summit for Halliburton et al.:
Where’s the fucking conscience caucus? It ain’t among the 40% - at least it shouldn’t be.
I’m sure you could come up with one with just a little effort, instead of trying to eliminate the subject from consideration. How about the rate of criminal prosecutions, indictments, and ethically-forced resignations? The record for 2 full terms is Reagan’s, with 138(cite from a Clinton-bashing site)
That’s the evidence, innit?
I didn’t say they were exactly the same, I just said that scientists haven’t worked all the kinks out of their corrupt-o-meter yet. The needle jumps around a lot, and for some strange reason the reading depends on who is operating it-- especially if two people from different political parties operate it.
That’s **exactly **what you did. You selected two items from when Bush was in office and left out everything from when Clinton was in office. And, as for the Frist thing, you might also want to google “innocent until proven guilty”. It’s unclear to me that there was any wrong done by Frist wrt his stock sales.
From cherry-picking to strawmen, Hentor. You need to get off that farm!!
My point exactly. Both parties are more interested in power than anything else. And we all know what power does…
Isn’t a strawman when you mischaracterize the opposing argument in such a way that it can be easily attacked?
If my name were Sam Stone, you might have a point. But my name is John Mace.
BTW, you also mischaractarize me by impying I’m a “conservative” who won’t agree with a “liberal”. Call me a “conservative” if you must (I’m not, but that’s immaterial to this argument), but here are 3 key issues of current interest that I’m certain I agree with you on:
-
I oppose the Iraq war. In fact, I did so from the very beginning-- back when Bush first started talking about it after 9/11/01.
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I have no ethicial problems with stem cell research, and to the extent that the federal gov’t **does **fund medical research, it should not restrict funding towards that effort.
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I absolutely oppose the teaching the Creationism or ID in public schools.
Oh, and btw, I didn’t vote for Bush in the last election, thank-you-very-much!
I apologize for the misunderstanding - my post was not specifically directed to you.
By the way - TOM DELAY WAS JUST INDICTED - on criminal conspiracy charges. Has the House majority leader ever been indicted in the past?
BREAKING NEWS
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay indicted on one count of criminal conspiracy by Texas grand jury, according to Travis County clerk’s office.
For the record, if Mr. DeLay is guilty, I hope he goes to jail for a long time. I’m just annoyed with the “gotcha!” games.