Monday, September 19, 2005
Bill Clinton: classless trash in an expensive suit
Bill Clinton sickens me.
His continuing self-aggradinzing effort to rewrite history, aided and abetted by the fawning leftist media, is disgusting. His personal conduct while in office, from having an affair with an intern, to lying about it under oath in order to perpetrate fraud upon the court in a lawsuit, to selling pardons to tax evaders like Marc Rich, was disgusting. His sucking up to the Hollywood crowd while paying lip service to leftist ideology while sticking close to the middle of the road to keep those poll numbers up was disgusting.
His exploitation of blacks and the poor was, and is, disgusting. Anyone willing to look at actual facts will find that the truth is the Bush administration has done much, much more for these groups than Clinton ever imagined. The Bush tax cuts removed millions of low-income workers from the tax rolls completely and shifted the tax burden even more disproportionately to the wealthy. Core education spending for the urban poor has more than doubled under Bush. The list goes on and on.
But Clinton, whose ego apparently knows no bounds, seems to believe that he is special. Rules don't apply to him. And he gets away with it. He is a serial molester of women and a political fraud. He had nothing to do with the economy of the 90's, which was managed by Alan Greenspan and driven by a Republican congress pursuing the balance of Ronald Reagan's agenda, such as welfare reform.
Clinton's true political legacy is "the campaign that never ends", to which we owe, in large part, the viciously acrimonious partisan climate of today's American politics. Clinton, perhaps driven by some deep-seated realization of who and what he really is, had no clue as to the separation between campaigning and governing traditionally observed in American politics. It was Clinton (and his charming wife) who kept private detectives on the payroll to dig up dirt on anyone who dared say anything negative. It was the Clintons (not the "Republican attack machine", or the "vast right-wing conspiracy") who developed and perfected the "attack and spin" style of politics: attack the critic, not on any issue, but personally, and then spin, spin, spin, using a friendly media to turn that critic into the one making attacks for cheap, petty personal reasons.
Well, I guess trash is as trash does, and Bill can't help bein' Bill. So we now have the (hopefully) final chapter in Clinton's "I'm the only one that matters, the hell with the country and the hell with the future" philosophy. Former presidents keep their mouths shut. They do not criticize successors, let alone seek out opportunities to go on national tv shows hosted by their old cronies and attack sitting administrations. Never in American history has a former president acted like Clinton did this past weekend.
But this is Bill Clinton we're talking about, and rules and traditions mean nothing. Bill is above all that. Bill is special. All that matters is Bill.
UPDATE: I've changed the title of this piece since I posted it. The original title was "...trailer trash in an expensive suit." I didn't change it for reasons of political correctness, which is one thing I don't worry about on this page, but because "trailer trash", while catchy, didn't really reflect the utter lack of class and crass gracelessness which is the point of the piece.
POWERLINE has an excellent itemized catalog of the litany of factual untruths spewed by Clinton in the interview. This should surprise noone, since Clinton has never let the truth get in the way of his personal agenda.
His continuing self-aggradinzing effort to rewrite history, aided and abetted by the fawning leftist media, is disgusting. His personal conduct while in office, from having an affair with an intern, to lying about it under oath in order to perpetrate fraud upon the court in a lawsuit, to selling pardons to tax evaders like Marc Rich, was disgusting. His sucking up to the Hollywood crowd while paying lip service to leftist ideology while sticking close to the middle of the road to keep those poll numbers up was disgusting.
His exploitation of blacks and the poor was, and is, disgusting. Anyone willing to look at actual facts will find that the truth is the Bush administration has done much, much more for these groups than Clinton ever imagined. The Bush tax cuts removed millions of low-income workers from the tax rolls completely and shifted the tax burden even more disproportionately to the wealthy. Core education spending for the urban poor has more than doubled under Bush. The list goes on and on.
But Clinton, whose ego apparently knows no bounds, seems to believe that he is special. Rules don't apply to him. And he gets away with it. He is a serial molester of women and a political fraud. He had nothing to do with the economy of the 90's, which was managed by Alan Greenspan and driven by a Republican congress pursuing the balance of Ronald Reagan's agenda, such as welfare reform.
Clinton's true political legacy is "the campaign that never ends", to which we owe, in large part, the viciously acrimonious partisan climate of today's American politics. Clinton, perhaps driven by some deep-seated realization of who and what he really is, had no clue as to the separation between campaigning and governing traditionally observed in American politics. It was Clinton (and his charming wife) who kept private detectives on the payroll to dig up dirt on anyone who dared say anything negative. It was the Clintons (not the "Republican attack machine", or the "vast right-wing conspiracy") who developed and perfected the "attack and spin" style of politics: attack the critic, not on any issue, but personally, and then spin, spin, spin, using a friendly media to turn that critic into the one making attacks for cheap, petty personal reasons.
Well, I guess trash is as trash does, and Bill can't help bein' Bill. So we now have the (hopefully) final chapter in Clinton's "I'm the only one that matters, the hell with the country and the hell with the future" philosophy. Former presidents keep their mouths shut. They do not criticize successors, let alone seek out opportunities to go on national tv shows hosted by their old cronies and attack sitting administrations. Never in American history has a former president acted like Clinton did this past weekend.
But this is Bill Clinton we're talking about, and rules and traditions mean nothing. Bill is above all that. Bill is special. All that matters is Bill.
No matter how you wrap it up, trash is still trash.
Bill Clinton sickens me.UPDATE: I've changed the title of this piece since I posted it. The original title was "...trailer trash in an expensive suit." I didn't change it for reasons of political correctness, which is one thing I don't worry about on this page, but because "trailer trash", while catchy, didn't really reflect the utter lack of class and crass gracelessness which is the point of the piece.
POWERLINE has an excellent itemized catalog of the litany of factual untruths spewed by Clinton in the interview. This should surprise noone, since Clinton has never let the truth get in the way of his personal agenda.
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