The Clinton Presidency and the WTC

“This is a great article and a must read. The Clinton apologists should hang their heads in shame.

Clinton's Shadow Hangs
Over US Attacks
By Andrew Sullivan
The Sunday Times - London
10-3-1

In the initial shock of the September 11 massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It is perhaps best summed up by the phrase: "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style jets, its uniquely horrendous death toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented.

But nearly three weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face and, if the errors are to be rectified, it is essential to acknowledge what went wrong.

Two questions come to mind: how was it that the Osama Bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly, for good reasons.

There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness that Tuesday is already slowing the capacity to bring Bin Laden to justice by constricting military and diplomatic options. And with a president just a few months in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus.

Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries - say, the invasion of the Falkland islands - ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?

The most plausible answer is that nobody has been fired because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in America's security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Bin Laden already attacked American embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been completely frank about his war. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Same guy, same building. To say that nobody could have anticipated this type of attack is simply to say that US intelligence wasn't good enough to have found it out.

How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in The New York Times in 1993.

Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defence priorities in response to the 1993 warning? No. No effort was made to co-ordinate the mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go undercover to pre-empt such attacks. Under the Clinton administration a law was passed making it more difficult for America to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - the kind needed to infiltrate Bin Laden's cells.

The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to US special forces being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such Delta Force units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of such forces was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.

In a remarkably revealing and overlooked article in last week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the 10 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union almost every aspect of American national security policy - from military operations to intelligence-gathering, from border control to political leadership - has been marked by . . . institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance".

The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the clueless, stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all, former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter.

Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks."

It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.

Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden.

Clinton's own former defence secretary, John Deutch, wrote in The New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses, and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. In general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning.

In The Washington Post that August, the following prescient words were written by L Paul Bremer III, the former anti-terrorism chief in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as Bin Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves to be at war with us. We cannot seek a 'political solution' with them."

Bremer then set out a list of what the US should do: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad, especially 'softer' targets such as American businesses overseas. Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush Bin Laden's operations by pressure and disruption. The US government should order further military strikes against the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The government, further, should announce a large reward for Bin Laden's capture - dead or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia common to all terrorists."

Sound familiar? It's exactly what is being done now, three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from adequate human intelligence.

This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective counterterrorism depends on good intelligence . . . We must pre-empt attacks before they happen. This requires improved co-ordination of intelligence collection. While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep-cover agents on the ground to infiltrate organisations."

None of this happened. The CIA's feckless record went uncorrected.

Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of a book called Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran.

In The Atlantic Monthly this summer, he emphasised the need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on Bin Laden's operation. Gerecht also reported the following devastating fact: "Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past 20 years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect consistently first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighbouring central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.

"Headquarters' reply: too dangerous, and why bother? The cold war there was over with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as endemic, and radical Islam was an abstract idea.

"Afghanistan has since become the training ground for Islamic terrorism against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years."

If you want to know why it seems unlikely that America knows enough about Bin Laden's whereabouts to mount an immediate attack today, then re-read those sentences. This is an intelligence failure of colossal proportions.

What happened to the man who presided over that massive failure? George Tenet, director of the CIA since 1997, is still in his job.

Not everyone in Washington was asleep at the switch. In response to the African embassy bombings, a national commission on terrorism was set up to propose changes. It was headed by a top-notch group of former officials and got plenty of attention. The panel argued that America was extremely vulnerable to a huge attack by a group such as Al-Qaeda, and recommended better espionage, more Arabic-speaking spies, better intelligence-sharing between the FBI and the CIA, wider wiretapping, and much of what is now on the table. The report was even prescient enough to have a picture of the World Trade Center on its cover.

But the report died the death of a thousand quibbles. Civil liberties advocates complained about a threat to individual freedom. James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute, said the proposals were like "the darkest days of the McCarthy era".

A writer in the online magazine Salon described the warnings of a domestic attack as "a con job with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel". The CIA opposed lowering its squeaky-clean standards for spies, and the FBI was desperate, under Clinton, to avoid any Reagan-like dirty tricks in its operation.

When the report came to Congress, it was attacked by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who distrusted the CIA and wanted to avoid what he called "risks to civil liberties we hold dear".

The proposal picked up momentum after the attack in Aden on the USS Cole last October, but was so watered down by the end of the legislative process that it was virtually useless. The Clinton administration did next to nothing to rescue it.

Clinton's former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, defended the president's record to Klein in The New Yorker. He argued that, after the embassy bombings, there was a concerted effort to find and kill Bin Laden, and that the cruise missile in Afghanistan missed its target by an hour, after which Bin Laden disappeared from view. Anonymous Clinton officials also blame the former treasury secretary Robert Rubin for resisting measures to cut off Bin Laden's financing, and to use cyber warfare to crack down on terror money networks.

Others blame the FBI: "[The FBI's] standard line was that Bin Laden wasn't a serious domestic security threat," one source told Klein. "They said that he had about 200 guys on the ground and they had drawn a bead on them." But whatever the nuances of blame here, it is clear that nobody from the top intervened, imposed order and reorganisation.

Earlier this year, yet another report, chaired by the respected former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, came to yet another definitive conclusion that America was vulnerable. They made exactly the same recommendations that are now finally being implemented; the report was well advertised and disseminated in the press - and still nothing was done.

Hindsight is easy, of course. In the halcyon and feckless climate of the 1990s, it would have required real political leadership to dragoon various stubborn government agencies into a difficult reorganisation to counter terrorism. It would have been extremely hard to persuade a sceptical public and a prickly civil liberties lobby that vast new powers were necessary to prevent catastrophe. This much is true.

But it's also true that there were several unmistakable attacks on America by the very forces that have now launched a war. It is also true that many, many people recognised this and were brave enough to warn about it.

In August 1998, Milton Bearden, the former CIA chief in Pakistan and Sudan, wrote in The New York Times: "The case against Osama Bin Laden is clear-cut. Through his self-proclaimed sponsorship of terrorism against the United States, he has, in effect, declared war on us."

In July 1999, William Cohen, Clinton's defence secretary, wrote in The Washington Post: "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real".

Whatever excuses members of Clinton's administration may have, they cannot trot out the excuse of not having been warned. We were all warned. We just preferred to look the other way.

It is clear that there are many in the American government who, while not being "guilty men" in sympathising with, and appeasing, the enemy were, at the very least, "negligent men". They deserve some sympathy. They were imperfect human beings in a world where September 11 was still an abstract. But we pay our politicians to assess the possibility of an actual threat. That's what they are there for. And, on that critical task, they failed.

If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible, in part, for what happened. More than 6,000 families are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the protection of its own citizens.

When a senior Clinton official can say of his own leader that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory", and when this administration is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting.

Clinton is not alone. The list of people who resisted or thwarted the measures needed to have avoided this catastrophe are many. They reach back to president George Bush Sr, who balked at removing Saddam Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf war, thus leaving the single most dangerous abetter of international terrorism at large on the world stage.

They include Bush and Clinton officials who failed to see the danger in the vacuum left in Afghanistan after the successful insurgency against the Soviets. They include senators, congressmen, lobbyists, civil liberties advocates and journalists - all of whom failed to see the danger. Few of us are free from blame, but the most blame must surely be attributed to the top.

We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen, in retrospect, as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction.

But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble that the administration did little to prevent.

The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves - they meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on.

We were warned. But we were coasting. And the main person primarily entrusted with correcting that delusion, with ensuring America's national security - the president - was part of the problem.

Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that is Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker with each passing day.

Additional research by Reihan Salam

MainPage
http://www.rense.com




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“Crap! And this was looking like a fun day on TT. 8( Buckle up, this could get rough!”

“ALL RIGHT! The dust has ALMOST settled, must be time to point fingers! Daddy Bush might want to hang his head right alongside ol' Hill-Billy, after all, he had the chance to put Saddam away...

Go Mariners!”

“i read it backwards!

bee-ZAT-buh-bah!!!!!!!”

“Solitary --

I know that you are busy simpering like a little girl and bending over so that Andy Sullivan have his way with you . . . but you might want to check out his background.

Andy Sullivan . . .what a puke.

He is the Rush Limbaugh of the written press.

Not that Rush isn't a legitimate source of hard news. (puke again)


btw . . . With 20/20 hindsight in his favor, Sullivan does make some very good points .

Perhaps he should descend from his porta potty in London to explain how PRE-SEPT 11, he would have motivated diseperate branches of govt., all BOUND UP BY DO NOTHING CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES CONTROLLED BY REPUBLICANS (!!!!!) to institute that types of war footing actions that we are now seeeing POST SEPT 11.


Roosevelt couldn't muster popular or congressional support for active US involvment in WWII until Pearl Harbor was attacked. In subsequent years there have been many who questioned what direct role his administration had in NOT preventing the attack from happening. Many leveled accusations that intelligence sources knew the attack was imminent, but did nothing.

That conjecture was that Roosevelt "allowed" the attack as a way to galvanize American support for a costly European and Pacific war.

Americans are notoriously dumb . . .perhaps complacent and content is a better phrase(the fat dumb and happy image . . picture cows in a field chewing their cud) . . .there was no chance [before Sept 11] that the changes now being proposed would have made it through congress.

Who among us wanted to wait in LONGER lines, have more restricted access, have our phone traffic monitored. Pre-Sept 11 . . .no way.

Perhaps one day in the not too distant future the next generation of sniping jackasses that accused Roosevelt of allowing the deaths of 2388 Americans so that he could get us into WWII, will accuse Dubya of allowing the deaths of 6000 Americans so that he could galvanize support for a war on terroism.

POST SEPT 11, congress is motivated to act. PRE_SEPT 11 the REPUBLICAN CONGRESS DID NOTHING!!!

By Andy Sullivan's reasoning . . .this whole f-ig disaster can be laid at the feet of the republican chairman of each congressional committee that blocked, stalled, procrastinated, watered down, obfuscated and otherwise sat on their thumbs.

Perhaps because the f-ing Republican chairman of congressional committees were so f-ing pbusy trying to figure out whether Bill Clinton was getting head while they weren't, THEY dropped the f-ing ball.

Solitary . . .you are a moron if you believe that Sullivan is on the money with his diatribe. The "blame" goes long and deep, and takes in as many, or more, republicans as democrats.

OKay . . .you can straighten up now. THanks.”

“"The time for action is past, now is the time for senseless bickering!"

Ashleigh Brilliant”

“I apologize for nothing I typed.

I believe that pre-sept 11 that we fat dumb and happy Americans did nothing, our fat dumb and happy republican congress did nothing, our 2nd past president Bush Sr, didn't do enough, and our immediate past president spent too much time polling the aforementioned fat dumb and happy Americans . . .which led him to conclude we were . . .fat dumb and happy and he need not rock the boat.

I apologize only that I got suckered in by the likes of Andy Sullivan and his minions.”

“Ladies, Ladies!!!

I've got a picture in mind of Henry Hyde sitting on his thumb(s)!
He must be a Two-Fisted Thumb-Sitter with a Hugh Jass like that!

lee-
Let's get Clinton NOW......that'll fix it!

PedXing-
Great quote!”

“I love how you omitted the 8 years of Cliton-Bore. Way cool! I wish I was as smart as you!”

“BaS04--

Read my second post again . . .

here, I'll quote it for you

"our immediate past president spent too much time polling the aforementioned fat dumb and happy Americans . . .which led him to conclude we were . . .fat dumb and happy and he need not rock the boat."

That would be a direct broadside at CLINTON. Our immediate past president.

I like to think of myself as an equal opportunity slanderer.”

“On behalf of all the intelligent people out there, I'd like to thank all the morons who voted for Clinton-Bore the last two elections, and I put some of the blame on you for what has happened over the past month.”

“Sorry, I didn't see the word "past".”

“If we are going to point fingers let's point all of them.

It was reagan that set up bin Laden during the Russo-Afghan war and it was reagan that only did the wimpy, crying, hand wringing after the Beirut barracks bombing. It was reagan's cowardice that emboldened the terrorists to continue their attacks around the world.

I personally like the guy, and politically agreed with a lot of his philosophies, but he was a terrible, weak, and ineffectual President.”

“Man, our country saw the most prosperous years in its history during the Clinton admin. Hmmm, interesting Bush gets into the White House and the economy takes a nose dive. And as was mentioned already, while the Repubs wasted time and money getting Clinton to admit he stuck a cigar up a chick's cooter, more pressing issues, like national security and airline safety, were being ignored. Hopefully those dimwits have their priorities a little more straight for the time being.”

“Thanks dude!!!

I'll take that blame with a side order of grits!

Can't you just FEEL the unity?

”

“Let's not forget the great Jimmy Carter and his masterful handling of the Iranian take over of the U.S. Embassy.”

“LOL "on behalf of the intelligent people..."”

“Andy Sullivan.... a cross between Andy Rooney and Ed Sullivan??

Dang, Gordon, ya beat me to it!! You can make points against both parties legitimately.

BUT........ who trained Osama and gave him money!! THE UNITED STATES through RONALD REAGAN. (hmmmmmmm, sounds Republican to me)

And speaking of Jimmy Carter...... I always knew how many days past my b-day old I was, since those hostages were taken on my b-day.”

“rosey, The Dow dropped 2000 points during Clinton's last year. It had dropped only a thousand points until the WTC.”

“Sure, a recession was beginning on his watch. But the dow also hit an alltime high during his term, so it had some space for falling off. Now its about to hit an alltime low. I'm still holding onto my stock tho. But man, I don't even want to look at my mutual fund statements.”

“Ya know . . .in a backas-sed kind of way . . we all agree. We do have a sort of consensus:

Solitary H -- its clintons fault
Lee-- it the republican congresses fault
Andy Sullivan/lee --Bush Sr has some blame
Gordon --Regan's fault
Baso4 -- Carter's fault

SEE??!!!

Like it or not . . .there is no EASY blame (the likes of which Andy Sullivan was trying to attach).

There are no easy to identify and single out causes.

AND

There will be no easy cures.

The fat dumb happy people of America have to be a little slimmer, wiser and more suspicious.

The ongoing campaign that W. has laid out has to be long and sustained. The money has to be budgeted. The political will must be maintained.

Finger pointing in an effort to attach "easy" blame is the first step in trying to find "easy" solutions.

None of this will, or should be easy.”

“Put away your fingers, guys....
......or put them to better use!”

“Hey Le Subtil, I was refering to you, lol!”

“Let it go gents. Learning from history is good but for Pete's sake...coulda, woulda, shoulda. Life is far too sweet to waste lookin' behind us. [to the Partrage Family theme]

"Come on get Haaappy!"”

“Yesterday the Postal Service dedicated the new 'United We Stand' stamp. Today we get this divisive drivel. Classy--real classy.

I won't respond directly to Sullivan's argument because to do so would only extend the divisiveness. I will suggest that people read the Klein article, which is hardly the attack on Clinton that Sullivan makes it out to be, and draw their own conclusions. Based on my reading of it, there's plenty of blame for at least the last four presidents.”

“Thanks Violin and Tehipite. Going straight to the source and seeing how it is represented or misrepresented is always educational.”

“ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

Would someone wake me up when this is over?”

“I am not sure 'blame' is the best word to use in assessing the actions of previous administrations. Everyone has 20-20 hindsight. It's really not fair to 'blame' someone for not foreseeing the future.

I expect my elected leaders to seek a broad range of alternatives make decisions on the best information available at the time. All evidence indicates this was in fact done by both parties in power.”

“mtnsteve, HEY! Wakeup! Repeat after me: "Serenity now....serenity now...."”

“The Klein piece IS good.

I heartily recommend that everyone who posted to this read it. THanks for the link Violin.”

“Interesting article in the opinion section of the paper today. In an article written by John Balzar of the LA Times, he says that his colleague, John-Thor Dahlburg actually had a number of articles published on the front page of the Times that foretold of terrorist attacks that were coming. One of the articles dates back to 1996.

Guess that shows how much stock most of us put in journalists. Probably also shows that LA (as well as the rest of the country) sleeps through good investigative journalism. Good journalism either gets lost in the manure or we just don't care. Besides there was the Clinton scandal, reality TV shows, and Bush's poor use of english to keep us all occupied.”

“This week's New Yorker has a piece that's more specifically about the CIA, by Seymour Hersh (who has done a lot of excellent investigative reporting over the years). Haven't read it, but it should be interesting.”

“Every American President in my lifetime has done a piss-poor job dealing with hijacking, terrorism, and dealing with the Islamic world. Then again, I was born in Nixon's first term - so it's not a very long list.”

“Arclite -
That's referred to as "hindsight bias" - the I-told-you-so BS.


Someone could drop a large tuna on Nancy Reagan, and somebody would come up with an article dating from 1980 that forewarned of such an event.”

“If news falls into print and no one reads it...

...does it make a sound?”

“I understand everything now Carter was flying the frist jet into the tower, Reagan was in the second jet into the tower, Clinton was flying the jet that crashed in Pa. and Bush Sr. was flying the jet into the pentagon. Silly ol' me here I thought it was some of Bin Ladens TERRORISTS that were to blame!”

“What about this president?

"Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them - and then you destroy yourself"
-Richard Nixon”

“Didn't Nixon get us out of Vietnam?”

“Let us pretend, for a moment, that the world is governed by the laws of nature..
cause and effect. And that there is a ubiquitous barometer called 'moral ethics' that dictates our actions at the time we make them.”

“Hey Biz, your big word reminds me.......heheeheh..... That writer used "feckless" THREE times in his article. THREE TIMES!!

What the heck is "feckless?"

Why, the f*ckler!!”

“lol lizs

I think it means 'little weiner'”

“LOL! It means careless. Keep a dictionary on hand Lizs, you writer, you!”

“As I stated previously and has now been confirmed by the media, we knew where Bin Laden was during the Clinton administration. Clinton would not authorize a snatch and grab or execution squad. Instead of going after him he sent cruise missles. I don't think it is a stretch to consider the Cruise missle attact as the catalyst for the WTC attack.”

“You can tell when a Clinton apologist is desparate. He/she can't do anything but start calling you names. Have a nice life lee.

Reagan /Bush Sr. had their screw ups but nothing compares to the incidents that occcurred under Clinton's watch. Think about it ... Somalia,
Haiti, Ruwanda, getting involved in Bosnia (we're still there after 6/7 years and will probably be for another 5), using a defensive organization (NATO) to attack another country (Yugoslavia), the USS Cole, WTC I, the American embassies bombed in two countries, the US Air Force barracks bombed in Saudi Arabia. And let us not forget about taking campaign contributions from the Red Chinese Army, and of finally, the Monica thing. It makes you depressed just thinking about how much the guy messed up.

As far as the economy?The Clinton administration rode a speculative bubble for seven years and milked it for everything they could get out of it. The trouble is, it popped a year before before he left office. We are just now (hopefully) hitting the bottom. No president can take credit for the economy and conversely no president can be blamed. Bush has no more to do with what is going on in the stock market than Clinton did.
Fifty years from now Clinton will be universally looked at by historians as a presidential disaster. Clinton apologists, quit making excuses”

“Uh.....wa.....oh... yall still at it..



Look I can straighten all this out easily for you...
















I'm right and you all are wrong.















ok.......what were we talking about?”

“Anyone who rags on any U.S. president when patriotism is running so high is feckless IMO”

“ZZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZzzz”

“Roseymonster, you go back to 90210? OK? hehehehehe

As a writer you don't use some word that sticks out (LOL...don't go there) like FECKLESS....... and then use it three times!!! If the guy is that careless with his word useage, well, who knows about the rest of his facts?

HE NEEDS A THESAURUS!!

OK, so he could say "careless" then..... or forms of "without merit"...... "riskily" (is that a word?? LOL)... "thoughtlessly"........ Hey and I did that on my own!! LOL”

“Well now my 2 cents worth.

I think the CIA and FBI are the biggest problem...
They were both worried about who was doing more better etc. etc. etc... They left the real issues behind in their stuggle for power in government circles...
Now look at them....
Barbara”