The REAL Political Legacy Of Bill Clinton Is NOT What The Left Wants You To Know

I responded to a typical weasel comment with enough facts and frankly enough words to turn the truth about the Clinton presidency into an article.  Here’s the typical weasel comment:

This post is a bunch of lies.. Clinton left a surplus

And my response:

Just can’t get away from stupid people, can I?

U.S. National Debt

09/30/1993    –    $4,411,488,883,139.38

09/30/1994    –    $4,692,749,910,013.32

09/29/1995    –    $4,973,982,900,709.39

09/30/1996    –    $5,224,810,939,135.73

09/30/1997    –    $5,413,146,011,397.34

09/30/1998    –    $5,526,193,008,897.62

09/30/1999    –    $5,656,270,901,615.43

09/30/2000    –    $5,674,178,209,886.86

09/30/2001    –    $5,807,463,412,200.06

These are official Treasury Dept taken from the Treasury’s site.  The numbers between 1993 and 1999 are here and the numbers from 2000 to 2001 are here.

I want you to notice, you deluded dumbass, that every single year of the Clinton presidency the national debt went UP.  THAT IS A FACT.  In the very real world, Bill Clinton never left us with so much as a penny of “surplus.”  Every single year of Slick Willie’s presidency, we got more debt and then more debt.

Bill Clinton assumed office in 1993.  Two years later, in 1994, the people were so angry at the fact that “Clinton gold” turned out to be Iron Pyrite that they voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in the greatest historic asskicking of all time.  Clinton lost both the House and the Senate to Republicans, and in fact never got either back for his entire presidency.

Bill Clinton said “the era of big government is over” in January 1996, which put the kibosh on liberal ideas for the rest of the Clinton presidency as Clinton governed as a moderate Republican from that point on.

In 1997, the Taxpayer Relief Act was passed by the Republican House and the Republican Senate before being signed into law by Bill Clinton.  As a result of those REPUBLICAN TAX REFORMS, federal income tax revenues surged just as they ALWAYS surge when the American people are allowed to keep more of their own money and invest that money far better than bureaucratic government EVER has or ever WILL.  And as a result, we actually briefly got to a federal budget surplus.  Because of Republicans and because “the era of big government was over” and because Democrats had had their asses kicked and ONLY because of those things.

It’s interesting.  Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate when we actually got our “balanced budget.”  And yet historically somehow the mainstream media gave Bill Clinton and the Democrat Party ALL the credit and the Republican majorities that had actually passed all the legislation that created that balanced budget zero credit.  It’s particularly amazing given the fact that Barack Obama controlled the White House, held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, AND controlled the House of Representatives his first two years in office, but the failure of the Obama economic policy is blamed on the fact that for two of Obama’s first four years Republicans held the House.  Basically, Democrats can never be blamed and must be given all the credit; whereas Republicans cannot receive any credit and must be given all the blame.

The same people who constantly lecture the Republicans about “obstructionism” somehow never recall the years when George Bush was confronted with massive Democrat obstructionism.  Obstructionism, was, of course, good and noble when Democrats were blocking virtually every single thing Bush tried to accomplish.  It is only evil if Republicans try to block anything their messiah Obama wants to do.

Now, sadly, 9/11 happened because Bill Clinton left America weak and blind.  Why did America get attacked on 9/11?  Because Bill Clinton showed so much weakness in 1993 in Somalia that a man we would one day know very well said:

“Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press…” — Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden began to prepare for a massive attack on America.  Oh, yes, he and his fellow terrorists hit America again and again: they hit the World Trade Center for the first time in 1993.  In 1996 they hit the Khobar Towers where hundreds of American servicemen were living.  In 1998 two embassies in Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) were bombed and destroyed by terrorists.  And in 2000, terrorists hit and severely damaged the U.S.S. Cole.  And Bill Clinton proved bin Laden’s thesis correct by doing exactly NOTHING.

Meanwhile, all throughout the Clinton presidency, al Qaeda was preparing to strike us.  They brought in all the terrorists who would devastate us with their second attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 2001 during Bill Clinton’s watch.

America was both weak and blind due to Bill Clinton’s gutting both the military and our intelligence capability.  And of course, being blind and unable to see what was coming would hurt us deeply:

Author James Risen won the Pulitzer Prize on Tuesday for his much ballyhooed New York Times report last December that revealed President Bush’s previously secret terrorist surveillance program – a revelation he uncovered while researching his book “State of War.”

In the same book, however, Risen makes an equally explosive claim about President Clinton’s relationship with the CIA – which his editors at the Times have so far declined to cover.

Upon taking power in 1993, Risen reports, the Clinton administration “began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters.”  The agency cutbacks combined with presidential disinterest took their toll almost immediately.

“Over a three-or-four-year period in the early-to-mid 1990s,” reports Risen, “virtually an entire generation of CIA officers – the people who had won the Cold War – quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of is senior pilots . . . “

After Clinton CIA Director John Deutch cashiered several senior officers over a scandal in Guatamala, the situation got even worse.

“Morale [at the CIA] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.”

And so we were hit on 9/11 and were completely blindsided by the attack because Bill Clinton gutted the military and the intelligence budget leaving us weak and blind.  And of course our spending skyrocketed because of the DotCom economic collapse that Bill Clinton left for George Bush that happened on Clinton’s watch but gutted $7.1 trillion in American wealth (almost as much as the Great Recession, btw) and which collapsed the value of the Nasdaq Valuation by fully 78% of its value as Bush was still trying to clean all the porn that the Clinton White House had left on the White House computers.  And so Bill Clinton handed George Bush a massive recession and like whip cream on top of his economic disaster he handed George Bush an even more massive terrorist attack.

But, hey, don’t worry.  Barack Obama is making all the same mistakes that Clinton made and then a whole bunch of even dumber mistakes that Clinton didn’t make.

Anyway, as you keep hearing that Obama will pave the streets with gold because Bill Clinton paved the streets with gold, please realize #1 that Clinton hardly ever paved the streets with gold and #2 realize that Barack Obama has not and will not govern the way Bill Clinton governed.

Do you know what bothers me the most about Obama’s reelection?  It’s that we have entered a profoundly different reality as a nation.  Barack Obama did NOT get reelected because he gave us a strong economy.  And both the polls before and AFTER the election document that many of the people who actually voted for Barack Obama believed that Mitt Romney would have given us a better economy.

Obama’s economic policy was a complete unmitigated disaster.  But what you need to understand is that a terrible economy makes for good politics for Democrats.  Because the worse the economy gets the more that increasingly amoral Americans will demand a stronger government safety net and welfare state.  Such that the worse Obama does economically the better he and Democrats will actually fair politically.

The beast is coming.

Obama Turns To Clinton To Advance The ‘Democrats As Party Success’ Myth As His Economy Turns to Crap

Barack Obama is widely seen as a complete failure.  Businesses large and small are turning on him and his incredibly harmful economic policies.  Even former staunch allies such as US News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman and GE CEO Jeff Immelt have turned on him.

His answer?  To turn to an impeached, disbarred, lying and oath-breaking, sexual predator and unconvicted rapist to save a failed president for the sake of the Democrat Party.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama sought on Wednesday to lift sagging confidence in his economic stewardship by enlisting the help of predecessor Bill Clinton, as a leading business group issued a scathing critique of the administration’s policies.

Clinton, who presided over the 1990s economic boom, joined Obama at a closed-door White House meeting with business leaders to encourage job creation and investment, including in clean energy.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a top business group, issued a rebuke of Obama’s economic agenda, accusing him and his Democrats in Congress of neglecting job creation and hampering growth with burdensome regulatory and tax policies.

What this country needs is a return to “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

It doesn’t matter that Clinton once recognized that Obama is little more than a Chicago thug.

It doesn’t matter in this Obama-era of race-baiting that Obama played the race card on Clinton.

It doesn’t matter that Bill Clinton subsequently demonstrated that he frankly deserved to be labeled as a racist when he outraged Ted Kennedy by telling him regarding Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”  Or that Clinton essentially said, “MAYBE joining the Ku Klux Klan was wrong” in honoring the former Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd.

All that matters in the mainstream media propagandist cesspool is that – while Barack Obama is increasingly recognized to be a complete economic failure and fraud – Bill Clinton is an economic hero who can therefore temporarily restore confidence in Obama and his failed policies until after the November election.

As usual, the media isn’t telling the full truth about Clinton.  Or what happened to create the healthy economy of the 1990s.

The mainstream media is remarkably consistent: you can count upon them to never give Democrats the blame they deserve, and you can count upon them to never give Republicans the credit they deserve, about anything.

Bill Clinton is widely hailed for presiding over a great economy that featured a budget surplus.

But let’s consider a very basic fact:

From the Herald-Journal, January 27, 1984”

If you took a quiz on government and were asked who writes the national budget, would you answer “The President” or “The Congress”?

The correct answer is “The Congress.”

The U.S. Constitution says that power belongs to Congress. All through our history, the Congress has exercised that power. The president cannot spend one thin dime that has not been approved by Congress.

Article One of the Constitution of the United States refutes the argument that Bill Clinton should receive credit for his “surplus”.  It was the Republican-dominated CONGRESS featuring promises that stemmed from the Contract with America, that resulted in the healthy budget that Clinton the media gave Clinton credit for producing.  Even though all he did was sign (often after vetoes) that which Republicans had actually produced.

What we don’t get told very was that Bill Clinton did such a miserable job running the country for his first two years in office that he suffered the largest (at least until this coming November) political defeat in American history when the Republicans swept into power over both the House and the Senate.  We’re not told that Republicans continued to be the majority party in both the House and Senate during the years that the media assigned Clinton all the credit.

It was those Republicans who were most responsible for the good times that resulted.  They are most certainly responsible for the budget surpluses that Democrats have congratulated themselves for ever since.  The very first item on the Republicans’ agenda was the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

One quick example of these Republican changes was welfare reform.  In his 1996 State of the Union, after losing even more fights, Bill Clinton was famously forced to admit, “The era of big government is over.”  And Republicans were making that statement true by passing welfare reform legislation and an avalanche of other cost-cutting measures that made a budget surplus possible.

Two welfare reform bills were passed by the Republican Congress, which Clinton vetoed.  Then a third bill was passed by the Republicans, which Clinton finally signed.  The National Organization for Women noted:

“There is little difference between the welfare bill (H.R.4) which the president vetoed in January and the new plan H.R. 3734/S 1795.”

An analysis by Steven Dawson for the Saint Louis University Law Journal observed that:

“In fact, President Clinton vetoed two largely similar prior versions of the bill.”

All rhetoric aside, Bill Clinton was FORCED to sign welfare reform into law by the Republican Congress.  Just as he was FORCED into a balanced budget, and any subsequent budget surplus.

But after being literally dragged into signing it, Bill Clinton took credit for it as though it had been his idea all along.  And the media duly reported that slanted history as a matter of “fact.”

That said, we can also point out that “the Clinton budget surplus” also had a lot to do with budgetary smoke and mirrors.

And like I said, the same media that will never give Republicans credit for something good will never give Democrats blame for something bad.

Consider the last three plus years’ worth of reckless spending.  The Bush administration has been blamed for much of this reckless spending, but it was actually a Democrat Congress that swept into power in 2006 (largely due to what we can now readily see was hypocritical demagoguery over the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina rather than any economic issue) which proceeded to spend America into the stratosphere:

For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%.  That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.

What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007?  Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget.  Three times.  And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.

Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control.  But you aint seen nothin’ yet.

The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.

The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.

The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.

With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark.  Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.

We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”).  Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.

And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.

The old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats:

In the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, the average deficit was $104 billion (average of final deficit/surplus FY1996-FY2007 data taken from Table F-1 below).  In just 3 years under Democrats, the average deficit is now almost $1.1 trillion (average of final deficit/surplus FY2008 and 2009 data taken from Table F-1; FY2010 data taken from Table 1-3).  Source: CBO January 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Minority Whip) rightly pointed out on ABC’s “This Week”:

“If you look at the kind of deficit that we’ve incurred over the last three years that the Democrats have been in control of Congress, 60% of the overall deficit from the last ten years has occurred in that period. And frankly with the incurrence of the debt, we’ve seen very little result. That’s why we think we ought to choose another way.”

And yet the media falsely blame BUSH and Republicans for that spending, rather than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, even though factually speaking the Democrats were ENTIRELY to blame for every single penny that was spent from January 2007 on.  Because our Constitution forbids a president from spending; it is CONGRESS that spends.

I also point out in that article (and many others such as this one) that Democrats were primarily responsible for the disastrous policies that led to the 2008 collapse.  They were basically completely responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their reckless policies, and then utterly refused to allow any reforms that would have averted the ensuing disaster.

In an honest world, Bill Clinton wouldn’t get anywhere near as much credit as he does for the strong economy of the 1990s.  And Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near as much blame as they received for the 2008 collapse.

The problem is, our mainstream media advances one outright lie after another.  And the lies become “truth” through sheer repetition.

Obama isn’t calling upon Bill Clinton to actually offer advice on how to turn the economy around; he’s calling Clinton in as a prop.  Bill Clinton was forced to change his failed policies when the Republicans swept into power.  Hopefully, that is exactly what will happen beginning this November.

Obama The Leering Cad: Not The Return To The Clinton Era We’d Hoped For

Note: Important Update and Comment appears below.

To be filed under the category, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Democrats are going to say, “He’s not looking at her butt!  He’s looking at… well, he’s looking at something on the floor!!!”

And I say, “Not with that look on his face, he isn’t.  And don’t think Sarkozy doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, either.”

There are many Democrats who laud the Clinton era, and yearn for a return to that gilded age when the streets were paved with gold.

There are flaws with their memories, of course: a comparison between the Bush and Clinton years doesn’t make George Bush look bad at all; the Bush tax cuts, contrary to Democratic talking points, actually led to “the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history”; the Clinton budget surplus turns out to be a myth that really should be exposed as such once for all; and everything else aside, Clinton’s biggest successes as president came AFTER voters rejected disastrous Democrat rule in the Republican revolution of 1994.

But let’s agree: things were a whole heckuva lot better with Bill Clinton at the helm than they are now under Obama’s faulty steering.

That said, this is NOT the return to the Clinton years anybody was wanting.  If you really want to be more like Bill Clinton, Barry Hussein, PLEASE don’t be like Bill was with women.  ANYTHING BUT THAT.

I hope Michelle slaps you silly, Barry.  I hope you sleep on the lawn tonight.  I hope a few $6,000 purses don’t cut the mustard.

UPDATE: I have since seen the video, which I will post, that presents a very different “picture” as to what happened:

The still image seems to show a laser-beam focus on the girl’s rear end; the video shows what would amount to a quick glance in the course of helping another woman down a step.  To the extent that Obama is “leering,” it amounts to something in momentary passing.  Nothing to get worked up about.

For the record, I wouldn’t have run the story if I’d seen the video rather than the picture.

I don’t take down articles.  I have NEVER taken down an article.  Why not? Because that’s what the left does, all the time.  They run absolutely terrible stories (such as the Daily Kos story questioning whether Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with Trig because it was really Bristol Palin who was actually pregnant with a child fathered by Todd Palin), and when the facts come out disproving such an attack they simply delete it and move on like nothing happened.  There was never an apology, never a mention that they had participated in anything wrong.  Just nothing.

I don’t want to be like that.  I want to take responsibility.

Someone took a “still” of a video that – while itself unedited and therefore “true” – created a very different inference as to what actually transpired than the whole story (or video) would have provided in context.  This is what the left does all the time: they isolate one aspect of a story from the context and broadcast an artificial and propagandized view of reality.  And they rarely ever admit what they are doing.

Here’s a fact-checked example of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – not to mention most of the mainline media – doing almost exactly the same thing with statistics that someone did with that “Obama leering” video:

With growing violence on the U.S.-Mexico border fueled by powerful drug cartels, officials from both countries have been repeating a shocking statistic to suggest this isn’t just a Mexican problem.

“This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States . . . more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to Mexico on April 16, 2009. “So we have responsibilities as well.”

Obama joins many other U.S. and Mexican officials — from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Mexican ambassador to the U.S. — who have cited versions of the 90 percent figure in arguing for greater U.S. intervention. For his part, Obama has pledged to commit more money and resources to stem the flow of guns south of the border.

But Obama, Clinton and others have left out important qualifiers when citing the 90 percent statistic, which originates from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency doesn’t have statistics for all weapons in Mexico, where gun sales are largely prohibited; the figure is based on only guns that the Mexican government sent to the ATF for tracing and that the ATF found were traceable.

Along those lines, the number was cited correctly by William Newell, an ATF special agent who oversees the bureau’s operations along border in Arizona and New Mexico, when he testified before a House subcommittee on March 24.

“In fact, 90 percent of the firearms recovered in Mexico, and which are then successfully traced, were determined to have originated from various sources within the continental U.S.”

Gun rights groups say the number has been widely and intentionally distorted to advance a gun control agenda.

And on April 2, 2009, Fox News ran a story on its Web site dismissing the statistic as a “myth.” The article cites statistics from the Mexican government that suggest only about a third of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico are submitted to the ATF for tracing; and it notes that many guns submitted to ATF cannot be traced. Therefore, the writers conclude, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the United States.

According to the article, “a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.” The article goes on to say many weapons are coming from a wide variety of foreign sources including China, South Korea, Spain and Israel, as well as from the Russian mafia and other nefarious sources in Asia, South and Central America.

“Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this,” National Rifle Association spokesman Chris Cox told Fox News. “The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment.”

ATF officials challenge the suggestion that Mexico only sends them guns they suspect are from the United States. In fact, the ATF found about a quarter of the 90 percent were made in other countries and then taken illegally from the United States into Mexico.

Here’s the Fox News story with the fuller array of facts.

What the mainstream media, and what President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, did with guns in Mexico is what largely passes for “news” today.  Half truths frequently amount to whole lies.  And we get carefully edited half truths that appear to tell a story supporting the liberal agenda as a matter of course today from our “journalists.”

Whenever you tell a story from one side, one “snippet,” you run the risk of bias.  And our drive-by media is filled with bias today.

I am doing something that the above media and persons have not done; I am presenting what amounts to a retraction, along with the full evidence so that people can come to their own conclusions.

So any liberal who wants to criticize me for this story, go ahead.  Just realize that even when I’m wrong, I’m STILL better than your people and your sources.