[Sosfbay-discuss] The Love Bush/Hate Clinton Wall Street Journal

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Dear Green Friends,

I am posting excerpts from an editorial published by The Wall Street 
Journal today as an example of the political insanity of our time in 
America.

Consider two editorials from the Wall Street Journal.

EDITORIAL #1 -- NOVEMBER 3, 2005

Published today WSJ argues, in a nutshell, that Bush's lies about Iraq 
are okay because "Bush-Hating" Democrats told the same lies. They 
simply quote all these hawkish statements by various Democrats Al Gore, 
Hillary Clinton, and Jay Rockefeller, Democratic Vice Chairman of the 
Senate Intelligence Committee. It's capped off with a rhetorical 
question:

"If Mr. Bush is a liar, what does the use of the phrase 'unmistakable 
evidence' make Mr. Rockefeller? A fool?"

Well, as a good Green Party man, my reply, Rockefeller, Gore, Clinton, 
and our own Sen. Diane Feinstein, are indeed. . . FOOLS!

EDITORIAL #2 -- FEBRUARY 19, 1999

Published just after the Clinton impeachment in 1999, WSJ indulges in a 
paroxysm of totally over-the-top, Clinton-Hating. Whatever we may feel 
about William Jefferson Clinton, we must never forget just how utterly 
insane these people about Clinton and that, frankly, trivial Whitewater 
scandal. Remember how special prosecutor Kenneth Starr turned over 
every rock in Arkansas digging up dirt on the Clintons? Notice how 
these ideologues try to argue that Clinton's personal weaknesses were 
somehow "proof" of the decadence of "Reactionary Liberalism" (I love 
the way reactionaries play games with words like "reactionary").

It is amusing (and terrifying) to replay some of this shit from 1999:

". . . Susan McDougal goes on trial next month for criminal contempt in 
refusing to say whether Mr. Clinton perjured himself over the key 
Whitewater loan. . ."

Nobody high up in the Clinton Adminstration was ever convicted of any 
crime, though poor Susan McDougal served hard time for "contempt" for 
not telling Ken Starr what he wanted to hear.

". . . delicious prospect of Hillary Clinton running for the Senate in 
New York will provide occasion to revisit the $100,000 commodities 
coup, the Castle Grande land flips, missing billing records and the 
rest."

Hillary was elected by landslide.

". . . Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, on whose watch the world 
economic crisis erupted, are preparing to blame it on too free markets 
and too much foreign investment."

Summers, as president of "liberal" Harvard became an instant 
"conservative" hero for denouncing Cornel West and saying "girls" are 
too dumb for science.

The whole thing is incredible rant.

Clinton's appointment of Janet Reno as Attorney General is "a sexual 
quota as Attorney General." These are same people who praised John 
Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales.

Clinton's corporate-friendly health-care plan was an attempt "to 
nationalize 14% of GDP."

Republicans in Congress, by some twisted logic, get credit for 
"enormous financial boom that still runs today."

Clinton was reelected in 1996 with the help of "financial contributions 
 from Chinese with intelligence connections." These are the same people 
who go into a rage whenever somebody brings up Bush and Cheney's direct 
and obvious connections in Middle Eastern oil interests.

Check out this peroration:

"Today the Democratic Party still counts traditional loyalties fairly 
won in its glory days. But it draws its muscle from labor unions unable 
to recruit private sector members, black leaders who can deliver votes 
but not advancement for their constituents, tort lawyers made rich with 
parasitic lucre, hypocritical feminists, stop-the-world 
environmentalists, lifestyle gays and the like. . ."

What do they mean by "lifestyle gays and the like"?

The Wall Street Journal is the second largest circulation newspaper in 
the United States and read by important people in government and 
commerce around the wrote. They ranted and foamed in this way about a 
middle-of-the-road, pro-corporate, pro-free trade Democratic 
Administration in a time of relative peace and prosperity.

I shudder to think what these FASCISTS think about folks like you and 
me.

Alex Walker

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Published by The Wall Street Journal, November 03, 2005.

EDITORIAL #1:
THE CLARE LUCE DEMOCRATS
HOW THEY'RE LYING ABOUT "HE LIED US INTO WAR"

Harry Reid pulled the Senate into closed session Tuesday, claiming that 
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all 
about, how this Administration manufactured and manipulated 
intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." But the Minority 
Leader's statement was as demonstrably false as his stunt was 
transparently political.

What Mr. Reid's pose is "really all about" is the emergence of the 
Clare Boothe Luce Democrats. We're referring to the 20th-century 
playwright, and wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, who was most 
famous for declaring that Franklin D. Roosevelt had "lied us into war" 
with the Nazis and Tojo. So intense was the hatred of FDR among some 
Republicans that they held fast to this slander for years, with many 
taking their paranoia to their graves.

We are now seeing the spectacle of Bush-hating Democrats adopting a 
similar slander against the current President regarding the Iraq War. 
The indictment by Patrick Fitzgerald of Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis 
Libby has become their latest opening to promote this fiction, 
notwithstanding the mountains of contrary evidence. To wit:

. . .

Everyone, that is, except Joseph Wilson IV. He first became the 
Democrats' darling in July 2003, when he published an op-ed claiming 
he'd debunked Mr. Bush's "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to purchase 
African yellowcake and that the Administration had distorted the 
evidence about Saddam's weapons programs to fit its agenda. This Wilson 
tale fit the "lied us into war" narrative so well that he was adopted 
by the John Kerry presidential campaign.

Only to be dropped faster than a Paris Hilton boyfriend after the 
Senate Intelligence and Butler reports were published. Those reports 
clearly showed that, while Saddam had probably not purchased yellowcake 
 from Niger, the dictator had almost certainly tried--and that Mr. 
Wilson's own briefing of the CIA after his mission supported that 
conclusion. Mr. Wilson somehow omitted that fact from his public 
accounts at the time.

. . .

Yet, incredibly, Mr. Wilson has once again become the Democrats' 
favorite mascot because they want him as a prop for their "lied us into 
war" revival campaign. They must think the media are stupid, because so 
many Democrats are themselves on the record in the pre-Iraq War period 
as declaring that Saddam had WMD. Here is Al Gore from September 23, 
2002, amid the Congressional debate over going to war: "We know that he 
has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons 
throughout his country."

Or Hillary Rodham Clinton, from October 10, 2002: "In the four years 
since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam 
Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons 
stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has 
also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al 
Qaeda members. . . ."

Or Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Vice Chairman of the 
Intelligence Committee, who is now leading the "Bush lied" brigades 
(from October 10, 2002): "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam 
Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will 
likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . .We also 
should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has 
made in development of weapons of mass destruction." If Mr. Bush is a 
liar, what does the use of the phrase "unmistakable evidence" make Mr. 
Rockefeller? A fool?

The scandal here isn't what happened before the war. The scandal is 
that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush 
saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are now 
using the difficulties we've encountered in that conflict as an excuse 
to rewrite history. Are Republicans really going to let them get away 
with it?

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Published by The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 1999.

EDITORIAL #2:
IMPEACHING REACTIONARY LIBERALISM

The 50-50 Senate vote on booting President Clinton from office is by no 
means the final curtain of the drama these columns have been following 
so closely for seven years. But it is certainly an occasion to reflect, 
and in the end we return to where we began. It is not entirely an 
accident that so flawed a personality became President, for great 
dynasties typically decline into personal and political corruption. In 
this sense Mr. Clinton represents the last gasp of New Deal liberalism.

With the end of the Senate proceedings, our friends and fans keep 
asking how we feel. Be of good cheer. The President has "won," clinging 
to office behind the Constitutional requirement of a two-thirds Senate 
majority. But whoever expected to reach that final barricade? The 
stonewall was skillfully constructed, and the Clinton scandals have 
been repeatedly declared dead. Yet the House has officially impeached 
for the second time in history, and the public is broadly convinced the 
President is indeed guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice, still 
felonies in most law books. Justice should require that he be convicted 
and removed, and we do indeed worry about what lame-duck mischief he 
may wreak. Yet politically, there are compensations for leaving him in 
office and keeping the books open.

If he had been somehow removed, he could parade as martyr and no one 
would much rise to say him nay. Acquittal, if that's what we're to call 
the hung jury, is instead freeing withheld truth. Judge Susan Webber 
Wright is considering holding him in contempt for his lies to her court 
in the Paula Jones case. With the revelations about the Juanita 
Broaddrick story by Dorothy Rabinowitz alongside, perhaps NBC President 
Andy Lack will stop censoring his news division (See related editorial: 
"Juanita Broaddrick Meets the Press"--WSJ Feb. 19, 1999). Webb Hubbell 
is still in court, albeit before Clintonista Judge James Robertson. 
Susan McDougal goes on trial next month for criminal contempt in 
refusing to say whether Mr. Clinton perjured himself over the key 
Whitewater loan. The delicious prospect of Hillary Clinton running for 
the Senate in New York will provide occasion to revisit the $100,000 
commodities coup, the Castle Grande land flips, missing billing records 
and the rest.

Mr. Clinton's continued tenure, too, provides the opportunity to 
explore how similar habits have bent public policy. The Cox report on 
technology transfer to China is still pending, for example. We divine 
 from rivers of ink in The New York Times that Robert Rubin and Larry 
Summers, on whose watch the world economic crisis erupted, are 
preparing to blame it on too free markets and too much foreign 
investment. We hope we're not alone in exploring what part the late Ron 
Brown and his Commerce Department's flying fund-raisers played in the 
investment process.

In the largest sense, though, it is not Mr. Clinton's small lies that 
matter. His whole career has been a lie. He came to the national scene 
as a New Democrat, a centrist governor pruning the excesses of his 
party. His first initiative, not counting gays in the military and a 
sexual quota for Attorney General, proposed to nationalize 14% of GDP. 
The health-care debacle elected a Republican Congress, and, with the 
bond market bottoming out on election day, this started the enormous 
financial boom that still runs today. Tacking back to the right with 
welfare reform (not to mention garnering financial contributions from 
Chinese with intelligence connections) he won re-election. In the midst 
of impeachment, he comes again with a State of the Union mimicking the 
platform so roundly rejected when offered by George McGovern in 1972.

While we would not exactly accuse Mr. Clinton of believing anything 
beyond the time it takes him to say it, his political instincts lead 
him to run to the center, but otherwise to return to his roots. That is 
to say, to the tax-and-spend liberalism so boldly announced by Harry 
Hopkins before World War II. Under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, 
of course, this liberalism had a far less cynical side. There were good 
reasons in their times for Social Security for the retired, for 
protecting labor unions, for federal efforts to end odious segregation 
in the South. The experience of winning World War II created a young 
and visionary leadership cadre that carried the Republic, and the 
Democratic Party, for many years.

Long before Mr. Clinton, though, the vision had degenerated into a 
parody of itself, and the political coalition had ossified into 
calculating interest groups. While the idea of a social safety net is 
universally accepted, no one any longer believes in government largesse 
as an engine of uplift. Today the Democratic Party still counts 
traditional loyalties fairly won in its glory days. But it draws its 
muscle from labor unions unable to recruit private sector members, 
black leaders who can deliver votes but not advancement for their 
constituents, tort lawyers made rich with parasitic lucre, hypocritical 
feminists, stop-the-world environmentalists, lifestyle gays and the 
like.

. . .

We were especially proud to publish Peggy Noonan's Friday article, "The 
Little Clintons." She discerns our dilemma; our politicians of both 
parties suffer a milder case of the personality disorder Mr. Clinton 
carries to an extreme. "More and more, politicians seem like weak 
egomaniacs, people so weak they let polls push them around and so 
egomaniacal they have to jump into the parade." The current President 
aside, "I am sure that in some ways it was ever thus, and yet I'm also 
sure that we can't afford this modern political personality anymore."
What we need are political leaders who believe in ideas and believe in 
themselves. In the House managers we saw a whiff of this, a rarity 
since Ronald Reagan left the scene. They failed to convict Bill 
Clinton, but they found something within themselves. If they bring the 
same sense of conviction to other issues they may win a larger 
accomplishment, impeaching reactionary liberalism.

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