[digg-reddit-me]Fora.tv had a great little video clip of sportscaster Jim Nantz’s role in bringing together George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for a post-presidential social summit.
Tag: Bill Clinton
The Daily Mail reported over the weekend that a recent study found that left-handers don’t do as well as right-handers in school, but earn more than 5% more every hour once they leave school. This is Drew-bait because an acquaintance of mine who we will for the moment call Drew, but who will remain otherwise anonymous, has a burning hatred for lefties and their sinister ways.
Oddly though, to illustrate this article, The Daily Mail inexplicably chose Robert Redford in his box office bomb The Horse Whisperer.
Let me suggest instead three other prominent lefties who have been in the news recently:
Categories
Casting Stones
I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.
From the statement of John Edwards in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton on February 12, 1999.
H/t Andrew Sullivan.
The old rule of politics is that a politician’s career isn’t done unless a politician is caught with:
a live boy or a dead girl.
Edwards releases this information on the Friday the Olympics begins and as a war breaks out between Russia and Georgia. He obviously is still looking out for a future political career.
[digg-reddit-me]Comments like these by Charles Krauthammer on McCain’s plan to create a League of Democracies ((An idea which I believe could make a positive impact under certain circumstances.)) make you realize what is at stake in the coming election:
“What I like about it, it’s got a hidden agenda,” Krauthammer said March 27 on Fox News. “It looks as if it’s all about listening and joining with allies, all the kind of stuff you’d hear a John Kerry say, except the idea here, which McCain can’t say but I can, is to essentially kill the U.N.”
It’s clear that McCain’s primary foreign policy instincts are Manichean, and that it seems likely that he would continue the worst of Bush’s policies, rather than following in the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
It is only because of the contrast between the radical, ideological “conservatism” of the Bush administration that McCain’s policy positions appear reasonable today.
This “reality-based conservatism” of McCain’s led him to question the initial push to go into Iraq for a while; to stand against torture for a while; to reject Bush’s tax cuts in a time of war at first; to champion immigration reform for quite a while. But as he saw his last chance to become president slipping through his fingers, John McCain, who had once described himself as the unrepentant champion of lost causes, decided to reconcile himself to the Republican base and reject many of the principles he stood for.
Since his political near-death experience this summer, McCain has moderated his opposition to torture (refusing to extend its prohibition to the CIA), given up on immigration reform (focusing instead on cracking down on undocumented immigrants), stopped hinting to the press that he would withdraw from Iraq if there wasn’t sufficient progress (as was widely reported in the summer of 2007), embraced Bush’s tax cuts (after calling them irresponsible and regressive). Some have called this shifts part an indication of his conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke. But what these observers fail to understand is the radical nature of the Bush presidency.
Edmund Burke believed that we must balance accommodation to the reality of our times with our core values. He believed in gradual change and opposed sudden changes in policy – but he also stridently opposed the radicalism of the French Revolution which had a similar foreign policy to the Bush administration, seeking to export the values of liberty, fraternity, and equality through the force of arms ((As pseudoconservativewatch (an excellent Google find) explained:
Edmund Burke invented the articulate philosophy of modern conservatism on the very basis of his critique of the French Revolution (see his Reflections on the Revolution in France). And yet in twenty-first century America, many who call themselves “conservative” are advocating a foreign policy of spreading principles of liberty and freedom to foreign countries in a manner hardly distinguishable from radical French revolutionaries.))
The irony is that McCain’s defenders, including Jonathan Rauch, defend his accommodations to radicalism by invoking the immutable opponent of radicalism, Edmund Burke himself.
[digg-reddit-me]A few months ago, I wrote a post called “Before we came here, we thought of ourselves as good people” using the words of Vince Foster to encapsulate the uncommon corruptions of the Clinton years. I was thinking of and looking for the video below when writing, from the conclusion of the film Primary Colors. Both the film and the book were intended to portray barely fictional representations of the Clintons. I believe that movie (slightly more so than the book) captured in a profound way both the appeal and the darker side of the Clintons. (See the trailer here).
The conclusion to the movie is pregnant with meaning given today’s current stand-off between a Clinton and a black man, especially given the arguments made at that time.
There are many issues to tease out of this clip.
Governor Jack Stanton, the clear stand-in for Bill Clinton, is trying to convince an idealistic young black man (of about the same age was Barack Obama in 1992 when the events of the novel happen) to support him as he justifies his use of scandals, smears, dirty politics to win a brutal primary against a candidate who is riding a public groundswell of support from people fed up with politics-as-usual. The governor explains why he needed to use every item in his disposal to take down the opposing candidate, despite their shared values – because the other candidate wouldn’t be able to win in November. The logic used then by candidate Clinton and his stand-in here, Jack Stanton, is the same as the logic used by Ms. Clinton to justify her tactics and continued presence in the race today.
It goes something like this:
1. The only way to win is to win dirty. (“Lincoln had to be a whore in order to call on the ‘better angels of our nature!’ “)
2. The Democrat opposing me won’t be able to win in November. (Because he isn’t willing to play dirty enough and/or because he has some other issues or scandals in his past.)
3. No one else with a chance to win would push the issues and care about the people the Clinton/Stanton candidate would.
4. Therefore, the Clinton/Stanton has a responsibility to save the Democratic party by taking down the candidate(s) opposing them by whatever means they can – because only they can win and push forward the liberal agenda.
Various news agencies have reported that this is exactly the argument that Ms. Clinton and her surrogates have been pushing in private calls to the superdelegates. It’s worth remembering that this is not the first time they have pushed this idea and used it to justify doing whatever they needed to win.
The Clintons seem to truly believe that they alone can win and save America – and that they are justified in doing whatever needs to be done to get them power. This has been their justification to the party for every betrayal, every time they have sold out their values, for every time they have taken out an intra-party opponent.
And if they can continue to make this argument to themselves, it is going to be a long summer.