WJC is simply a target-rich “personality”. The facts of his odious deeds simply can not be refutted.
What else do you do with such a ripe target? He’s simply a scab that deserves pickin’.
I’m all for pragmatism and reality, but that is rather a sizable load of dog doo. It is is blemish on his record, and a big one at that. You have a “law & order” Republican administration unilaterally deciding which laws it chose to follow and its leader professing ignorance of it happening. As you state, there is no doubt that it happened, which leads to two possibilities: he knew, and is one of the worst criminals to ever sit in that office, or he didn’t know what was going on in his own White House. And in this day when the operation sold weapons to an “Axis of Evil” country, can you really say it wasn’t a blemish? Blemish? Shit, that’s a goiter!
As for comparing Reagan and Clinton, I think it’s fair to say that opponents felt all too often that the reason the two survived was mainly out of charm. I never met Reagan, but I met Clinton, and he has a most un-nerving charm that can disarm you no matter what you do. Reagan seemed to be able to flow between stern statesman to a “gee-gosh” naive kid-like personality at the drop of a hat. Never ever underestimate charm, it can take you anywhere.
And another thing about why some Republicans won’t let Clinton go: I think Republicans take politics much more seriously than Democrats, which means that the fight is never over. Clinton is still around, and therefore he still has power. It may not be the power of office anymore, but don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s just a civilian. He is still a target, and I think until he’s dead there is an ugly validity in that.
Brutus, are you seriously suggesting that there was and is no widespread personal hatred of Clinton the man? You’re showing quite a bit yourself, there, for one example.
And are you seriously stating that you think adultery is a far worse transgression than treason? If so, I don’t think you have much to contribute on the subject of moral principles, either. Semp is right on, btw.
Let me take another stab at the OP, as to why Clinton was and is so hated. Remember the kid back in junior high and high school, who always got straight A’s, won the science fair, captained the debate team, made all the speeches, dated the prom queen, and went on to the best college? Didn’t that drive you nuts? Weren’t you so jealous of him that you hated him, and took every opportunity to give him wedgies, knock his books down, mess up his projects, and so forth whenever you thought you could get away with it? When you found out his parents were divorced, or that he had to work instead of go to school, weren’t you happy to learn that he was finally getting what he deserved?
Well, years later, many of you realized how hateful and stupid you had been, you had grown out of it, and you may even have apologized to him. You had your own sense of self-worth, and didn’t have to try to bring anyone else to your level. You realized that the world was a better place, and your own life was more enjoyable, without indulging in petty, childish crap. But many of you still could never get over the thought that someone else was simply a better person than you. Ring a bell with any of you?
But why do many “conservatives” still hate Clinton, as the OP asks? Well, many of the people I’ve described still haven’t matured.
Yes, I am suggesting that. And seeing that you have no proof to bring to the table, it seems you agree with me.
Nope, I am not saying that at all. But since Clinton commited both adultery and treason , he is twice-damned in my book.
Clinton seems to be the only thing in your life that gives you a sense of purpose, so I won’t go into all of the other crap he did, but I do want to point out: It is liberals like you that give liberals a bad name.
For a lot of the folks over here, definitely. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a total cop-out, for instance, and NAFTA was so anti-union that the GOP should have made him an honorary Republican after that got through.
Clinton may not have completely abandoned the left, but he was so busy playing to the right and trying to broaden his appeal that having conservatives call him a “liberal” is as silly as Daffy Duck insulting Donald Duck’s speech impediment. 
As for Reagan vs. Clinton, I’d much rather have a guy who’s got a healthy libedo than someone looking for ways to circumvent the laws of the land.
Gee, only the quickest of cursory google searches found this. Second paragraph begins with…
I find it amusing that Elvis responds to those that disagree with him with anger and lambasting. In any case, based on Elvis’s response, I think that Astorian whooshed him pretty good.
Whoa, Brutus, Whoa. You have just accused an ex-president of treason. You use a very biased book review as your “evidence”. That dog don’t hunt.
Iran-Contra* is closer to treason than alleged influence peddling to Pacific Rim nations. Please allow this moderate to remind you, the Iran-Contra investigations produced convictions. The whole Indonesia thing was a tempest in a teapot. Ken Starr didn’t even go too deep into it.
[sub]*bad, very bad. Legislative branch expressly said “no”. Executive branch did it anyway. Bad, very bad.[/sub]
Hmmm… liberty.edu… Do you also think gays, abortionists and pornography are the root cause of 9/11? And you do realise, of course, that The Very Reverend Jerry Falwell used his TV pulpit to sell The Clinton Chronicles, which accused Clinton of… well, anything they could think of. Not the most objective source to use for an accusation of treason.
But you are correct in that he is an adulterer. Just like Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, Tim Hutchinson, Dan “scumbag” Burton, and seemingly most of his congressional accusers. But, yep, he did screw around.
Truly an airtight cite there, Spoofe. An Australian commentator repeating an opinion you happen to share. Your mother must be proud of you. There ain’t enough smilies for that one.
Beeblebrox and Semp pretty well covered Brutus already.
We deal with facts here, Bubbas. And it is indeed taking longer than we thought.
Anyone who thinks that the left didn’t have a visceral, personal hatred for Reagan the man either didn’t live in the 80’s, or if they did they weren’t paying very close attention. Reagan was DESPISED. He was ‘Ronnie Raygun’, the man who was going to kill us all. He was a senile, doddering old warmonger who was going to let the poor starve in the streets, destroy social security, set back the cause of women and minorities by fifty years, and get us all into a nuclear war.
The man was burned in effigy on campuses. I was in college at the time, and had plenty of debates with people who were spitting with hatred at the guy. Reagan was shouted down by students when he tried to speak. Anyone remember, “I’m PAYING for this microphone!”?
Remember Nancy and her astrologer? Remember all the stories about how stupid Reagan was, and that Nancy was really running the show?
I’ll fully admit that there are a lot of conservatives who have what I would consider to be an irrational, over-the-top hatred of Clinton. Because even from a conservative’s standpoint, Clinton was just not all that bad. But for some of you to claim that Reagan was never personally hated is ridiculous. It’s either ignorance, or a denial of the historical record.
Reagan was more hated by the left than Clinton was ever hated by the right. I was there. I watched it.
Anyone who thinks that the left didn’t have a visceral, personal hatred for Reagan the man either didn’t live in the 80’s, or if they did they weren’t paying very close attention. Reagan was DESPISED. He was ‘Ronnie Raygun’, the man who was going to kill us all. He was a senile, doddering old warmonger who was going to let the poor starve in the streets, destroy social security, set back the cause of women and minorities by fifty years, and get us all into a nuclear war.
The man was burned in effigy on campuses. I was in college at the time, and had plenty of debates with people who were spitting with hatred at the guy. Reagan was shouted down by students when he tried to speak. Anyone remember, “I’m PAYING for this microphone!”?
Remember Nancy and her astrologer? Remember all the stories about how stupid Reagan was, and that Nancy was really running the show?
I’ll fully admit that there are a lot of conservatives who have what I would consider to be an irrational, over-the-top hatred of Clinton. Because even from a conservative’s standpoint, Clinton was just not all that bad. But for some of you to claim that Reagan was never personally hated is ridiculous. It’s either ignorance, or a denial of the historical record.
Reagan was more hated by the left than Clinton was ever hated by the right. I was there. I watched it.
“I was there. I watched it.” Sam, you lived in the US at the time? I did, and do. What college down here were you at?
Yes, of course, there were, and are, those who hated him personally, as well as hating his policies. It’s a big country, and on campuses especially it’s easy to find people willing to adopt any cause with more emotion than reason.
But the point was about extent personal vs. policy-based hatred, and the comparison to Clinton-hatred. There simply is no comparison, no matter what those of you who watch only Fox may think.
To clean up another matter, re Iran-Contra and treason, it isn’t about the Contra part and its illegality. Iran had declared war on the US. The Reagan administration was selling them arms. Look up “aid and comfort to the enemy” in your Constitution. The most charitable assessment of a President who took no interest in foreign policy to the extent that it could be done would be “contributory negligence”. But he was still a likable person.
rjung said:
That’s a bit revisionist. In truth, both men started out by trying to appeal to their ‘base’, and both of them were forced to moderate their positions significantly. Clinton’s first couple of years in office saw a laundry list of left-wing policies - Gays in the military, Hillary’s health care task force, the appointments of Joycelyn Elders and Donna Shalala among other fairly extreme appointments… But Clinton took so much heat for this and lost so much political capital that Republicans won the house in the mid-tern elections, and after that Clinton changed course and became pretty much a centrist politician.
Reagan did much the same. He started with a number of very conservative appointments, he fired the ATC controllers, went to war with other unions, and pledged to drastically cut the size of the federal register. He then suffered a backlash and moderated his policies, and was forced to deal with a Democratic house. In the end, Reagan wound up growing the size of government, caving in to the AARP, scrapping his plans to restructure welfare (later carried out by Clinton), etc.
This I agree with, with the caveat that we erase Clinton’s first two years as president. The Health Care Task Force was a disaster, both politically and as policy. He could have called himself a spotted frog and it still would have been attacked by the right and lots of the public. Some of his early appointments WERE left-wing flakes, and he would have taken heat for it.
But the Clinton of the last six years of his presidency was pretty much a centrist. You could even call him a conservative. Certainly his policies were more conservative than those of Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, or maybe even George Bush I.
I think maybe this is more an indication of how far to the right the political spectrum has really moved.
Elvis, you’ve really got to get off of this Canada bashing thing. Really. Canada is tidally-locked to the U.S. We watch your TV, read your papers, and debate your issues. Especially when it comes to Reagan, because the main issue surrounding him was the Cold War, which affected Canadians as much as Americans.
For the record, I was at the University of Alberta studying physics between Reagan’s first and second term. You couldn’t walk twenty feet without seeing a caricature of Reagan posted to a bulletin board somewhere. Canadians protested just about everything Reagan did. Nicaragua was a continual source of friction, as was cruise missile testing.
In the U.S., Reagan was hated viscerally by students on many campuses. Their animosity started when Reagan was governor of California, and cracked down on campus protests at Berkeley.
Ummmmmmm, Reagan wasn’t even President when that happened.
Try again.
Was Reagan hated “personally” by the Left? Amongst many, yes, of course. Don’t forget, Reagan was a turncoat, he used to be a Democrat (although saying he was a liberal would tax the definition of the word). Part of the ire of a bunch of those banana-bread-makin’-tree-hugging-pot-smoking Ivory Tower liberals might have been a certain degree of jealousy that one of their own had “turned to the dark side” and wound up with more power than they had had in almost 20 years.
I doubt you’ll find any twentieth century president who didn’t have some people who hated him just for who he was (and I’ll leave out any pres. from before then just because the public didn’t have the opportunity to know them like we have in the past, say, 75 years). To say Clinton didn’t have his share of such detractors suggests either naiveté or revisionism. I’ve had relatives who have claimed to hate him, but when pressed for reasons usually make their way back to “I just don’t like him.” And you know what? There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If they then go on to start spreading questionable, if not outright slanderous information about the object of their derision, that’s when the line is crossed, and I think that’s what happened to Clinton (adultery -> corruption -> drug using & dealing -> influence peddling -> murder! -> treason!!). Too many people allowed themselves to get whipped up into a froth over the Clintonian Boogeyman, dominoes fall, and we get impeachment proceedings.
“Slick Willie” suvives, so the fires of hatred continue to burn. Reagan appointees in various scandals and probes wound up getting convicted, so liberals get some scalps (although not the best ones, and Bush the Elder’s 12/24/92 pardoning of 12(?) Iran-Contra defendants killed the investigation) and their bloodlust gets sated. Ultimately, the 1980s Demoractic tit has more to show than the much flashier 1990s Republican tat. But they both made for some smashing TV!
Yes, I know, WSLer. It was during the Presidential primaries, if I recall. I was just pointing out that Reagan faced a lot of very vocal opposition.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that Reagan wasn’t as hated by the left as Clinton was hated by the right. Being on the right at the time, I know first-hand just how much hatred there was for Reagan among the left. You couldn’t say two words back then without some yahoo launching into a spiel on that evil, senile, poor-person starving, democracy-squashing, warmongerer.
Reagan was hated by the left long before he became president - basically ever since he supported Goldwater in 1964, and especially since he gave a very impassioned, televised speech in favor of Goldwater.
Does anyone remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the “Two Tribes” video which depicted Reagan as a warmonger in a boxing ring with Gorbachev?
This assertion that Reagan wasn’t hated by the left during his presidency is simply wrong.
Well, this thread is as good an arguement against term limits as I’ve ever seen. From what I recall of public opinion, at the time of the last election, Clinton may very well have been re-elected.
That would have been very interesting, indeed.
Bill Clinton was popular, here and abroad. That, in itself, makes him an easy target.
Peace,
mangeorge
Actually, I was just musing the other day that what the nation really needs is a limit of one term for the U.S. Presidency. The President, freed from any worries about appealing to the masses in order to get re-elected, can then take a hard-line stance for whatever position he really believes in.
Gee- I think you are seriously rewriting history- the opposition came from George Bush.