While I have no big problem with Hillary (and have actually been rather impressed with her performance as a senator), these are the things that tend to bug conservatives (myself included, at times).
Hillary is:
[ul]
[8]A hypocrite. This is the thing that bugs me the most. She was a radical leftist activist, and she and her husband campaigned against the ‘culture of greed’ of the 1980’s and the first Bush administration, specifically citing things like shady S&L’s and rich people avoiding taxes. Then it turns out that they were among the most ambitious, greedy people you could find. While her futures trading deal may not be prosecutable, it smells REALLY bad. It’s a very common way to pay off politicians, and their broker who arranged her trades went to JAIL for doing similar trades for others. Their personal friends went to jail for S&L fraud. They did everything including claiming used underwear donations as tax deductions to pay as little tax as possible. None of this is illegal, but it is hypocritical for someone so shrill in her accusations of greed against others.
[li]She’s mean. When the Clintons took office, they fired the entire white house travel office, and replaced them with Arkansas cronies. But what’s worse, to provide cover for their actions they accused the travel office employees of a number of heinous things, destroying their careers. A couple of those people spent their entire net worth trying to defend their reputations. Years later, I don’t believe any evidence of wrongdoing ever came out against those employees.[/li][li]She’s dishonest. Aside from lying about the files, she also modifies her own political opinions based on what it takes to get her elected. When she decided her best chance at the Senate was New York, suddenly she became the biggest Yankee fan in history, and her political positions all mutated to suit New York. Today, one gets the sense whenever Hillary is speaking that you’re not hearing the ‘real’ Hillary, but the one that her handlers told her was the right one to present that day.[/li][/ul]
To be fair, accusations of duplicity and hypocrisy can be levelled at pretty much every political figure. That’s why Hillary doesn’t particularly bother me. Sure, I think she’s a lot farther to the left than she lets on in public, but so what? I’ll bet Trent Lott is a lot farther to the right than he lets on, and David Bonior is farther to the left as well. Again, politicians can’t always say what they really think, or they’d never get elected.
Hillary is no saint. She’s just another power-hungry politician willing to stomp on people or lie to get what she wants. But hell, Washington is full of them, in both parties.
Tell that to John Tower, Zoe Baird, Jocelyn Elders and Linda Chavez. :rolleyes:
Besides, you’ve got this pesky thing called the “Constitution.” It requires Senate advise and consent. Just because most appointees sail through doesn’t mean a constitutional check on the power of the presidency should be entirely disregarded.
Ok, Scylla, you’re not the dittohead I thought you were. I’m actually an independent, not a Dem. I just get really bugged when some people (not you) use words like “evil” to condemn those who disagree with them politically. I think GWB is an idiot but I wouldn’t call him “evil.”
Sam Stone, the only thing I would take issue with in your post is the statement that Hillary “lied” about the billing files. That has never been shown to be the case. I think everything else you said is fair, though. I don’t contend that Hillary is a saint, only that calling her “evil” is over the top.
Dewey, I agree with you. I’m not defending the status quo, just describing it as it is.
Yeah, Rush Limbaugh NEVER says anything simplistic or knee-jerk. The Clintons were villified like no other first couple in history, but any criticism of poor little W, and the GOP accuses you of treason. For conervatives to whine about exaggerated rhetoric is laughable.
Harken: discussed to death in the threads I linked to above. Nothing even remotely approaching a plausible allegation of wrongdoing to be found.
Halliburton: Care to make an allegation? The closed thing to it that I’ve heard is that their stock went down, which isn’t a crime, and that Cheney got out before the slide – because he had to, because he was going to be Vice-President.
Enron: Nothing Bush and Cheney have done have even remotely been linked to the shenanigans going on there. The closed thing to it is that Enron gave a lot of money to Bush’s campaign. Fat lot of good it did them, too – when Enron started collapsing, they asked the Bush administration to intervene. They didn’t. The rest is history.
This has also been discussed in previous threads, but the hamsters aren’t being kind to me today, so you may wish to search yourself.
The issue has been discussed and ample evidence has been shown in those threads to show guilt, notwithstanding the apologetic, tortured, implausible explanations by conservatives.
You have been specific links where discussions on those topics have occured.
You have asserted that Bush and Cheney’s guilt in Harken/Halliburton is undeniable.
After considerable effort analyzing the documents relating to both of these, and professional experience of the subject matter, it is my opinion that the accusations are built on falsehoods, misrepresentations and outright fabrications, the Cheney/Halliburton thing being particularly laughable.
If you have a logical argument to the contrary, please put it out there.
(Please use cites, and please do not use editorials as cites)
Otherwise please retract your assertion as fact that they are guilty.
Okay, I have been gone all morning and just got back. I am most impressed by the tone of the responses to my question. To answer a couple of questions, the people I mentioned who believe Hillary is evil **will not / cannot ** point to any one thing that makes her so. They just know she is evil in the same way they know a horse can’t dial a telephone. To a man, these people all support a war on Saddam because he might give WOMD to terrorists. They also believe that John Ashcroft is absolutely perfect for the position he holds, while I believe he is the most dangerous man to ever hold high public office in this country, not excepting GWB. If it weren’t for my kinship with my sister, this group would probably have lynched me long ago. I shouldn’t express my views since I know these guys are getting old, they have high blood pressure, etc., etc., but it is so much fun to jerk their chains. I think I will email a few of them with a link to this thread.
I’m not so sure you should be so smug. You certainly haven’t grounded your position on Ashcroft and GWB in anything but a feeling, and Diogenes’s position seems to be nothing more than an assumption of guilt on general principles.
What makes you think you’re doing anything different than them with your opinions?
Scylla, I did say it was my view—but it does come across as smug and I will retract it since it is an opinion and not a fact. Got hoist by my own petard, didn’t I?
I think the most pertinent part of the OP is that most of these folks are retired military.
My husband has been in the Marine Corps for 17 years, which means that I have been in the Marines Corps (by association) for nearly as long. The military establishment [sup]TM[/sup] hated Bill Clinton. They hated him for a variety of reasons, but the primary of which was his stance on gays in the military. This hatred seemed to congeal around his wife. It’s against some kind of military standard (I don’t know if it’s written or just understood) to “dog” the President, who by his position is Commander in Chief of the armed forces, so a whole lot of the bile seemed to be directed at Hillary.
By and large, military personnel seemed to feel that she had had way too much power, and was, in some way actually writing policy (especially after the health care debacle). Now if that is not enough generalizing for you, here’s a little more. There exists a fair amount of Marines (I don’t know about the other branches) who like to think that women should know their place, and she didn’t.
I fully apologize for all off-base generalizations. I speak only from own experience, thus feel free to tell me I am wrong, as I may very well be.
light strand, your generalizations do seem to be fairly off-base. I don’t doubt that there are some military personnel who dislike Clinton for those reasons, but I don’t believe they are indicative of the army as a whole (based on my experience working with current and retired military personnel).
The reasons I believe the military dislikes Bill Clinton are as follows:
He was a draft dodger. That right there probably accounts for 75% of their animosity.
He tried to weaken the military during his tenure in office.
He generally showed no respect for soldiers. When he would salute them, is was always half-hearted, and done with a certain measure of reservation. Contrast this with GWB, who gives them textbook-salutes and makes it clear that he respects them.
He sent them on a bunch of humanitrian missions, which is not really what the military is meant to do. This lowered morale by quite a bit.
He cheated on his wife, then lied about it. This is not tolerated in the military.
You’re correct in saying that the military can’t criticize the president. You can be court-martialed for it, in the same way that you can be court-martialed for criticizing any of your higher-ups. The reasoning is that such criticism lowers morale, and morale is of profound importance in military operations. Hillary, however, would’ve been fair game.
And I would also like to point out that as much as the military disliked Clinton, it was with nowhere near the vehement gusto with which they detest Jane Fonda. Now there’s someone who wouldn’t want to wake up and find herself in an army barracks.
Of course Hillary Clinton is pure evil. She has bewitched Scylla and december into defending her. (Badly, but hey, minions defend badly, just watch LOTR.)
As for Hillary being a nobody before Bill Clinton was President, that isn’t so, Hillary Clinton was a nationally recognized lawyer on the issue of children’s rights during the 80s.
