What Joe said. Although I could cut Melissa Harris-Perry some slack, due to the fact that she was a teenager when we had eight years of peace and prosperity under Clinton.
Yep
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What Joe said. Although I could cut Melissa Harris-Perry some slack, due to the fact that she was a teenager when we had eight years of peace and prosperity under Clinton.
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sorry but even in points where i agree with him, joe comes across as a major asshole. that’s a pretty ineffective way of arguing.
and in case he’s actually curious about the specifics of president clinton’s covert warfare, there was colombia, afghanistan, iraq and several countries in the balkans. plus there’s the non-covert warefare from clinton’s era: the u.s. invasion of haiti, the bombing of serbia and kosovo, plus boots on the ground military commitments to bosnia and kosovo, and bombings and missile strikes against somalia, iraq, and afghanistan.
i’m not arguing about the “eight years of prosperity” (though, in fact, it was actually only about 6. clinton inherited a recession, remember?) but “peace” requires quite a bit of amnesia.
“Major asshole” is part of my uncharm. Thanks.
Comparing Clinton’s record on militarism to Obama’s is inane. I can’t think of a decision he made that I found terribly disagreeable — except for his refraining from action in Rwanda. (And he did NOT invade Haiti.)
I do not cut Melissa any slack for being young. No-one under the age of forty should ever be allowed to write about politics.
Clinton’s “eight years of prosperity” gave us millions of jobs at Burger King at minimum wage, while exporting $30.00 an hour factory jobs by the millions overseas through NAFTA. All bush had to do was to sell real estate to millions of minimum wage workers. The factory jobs disapeared overseas and so did all of those minimum wage jobs that Clinton created. “Eight years of prosperity” followed by unheard of wealth and power being transferred to the oligarchy. Clinton failed “we the people” but he succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of his employers……the oligarchy. Anyone who credits Clinton for an era of “Peace and Prosperity” is on his payroll.
And he did NOT invade Haiti.
sure, and bombing libya is not “hostilities” under the war powers act. semantics can make most problems go away!
you can call “operation uphold democracy” whatever you want, but i think it’s fairly clear that sending in u.s ground troops to overthrow a government and install a new leader usually falls under the label “invasion”. it is true that the haitian leaders agreed to resign just before the u.s. forces started firing, but the troops then still came. removed the offending government, installed a new leader and remained as an occupying force for another year (before they were replaced by troops from a UN-flagged mission, which is still there today).
the thing is, there is plenty to criticize obama about. you’d have to be pretty foolish to not see at least some of it. but likewise, there is plenty to criticize clinton about too. it’s utter nonsense to airbrush away the flaws of some prior president in an effort to criticize the current one.
it’s also an ineffective argument style for criticizing obama because what ends up happening is an argument over whether your version of history is correct rather than keeping the focus on the present policies of the current president. you know, like we’re doing right now.
The long and the short of it is this. Both Clinton and Obama were/are bums. The policies of both were/are just awful for we the people. But…….but, the oligarchy loved/loves them. Supporting any of these politcal people, except to wring out from them what can be got, is a fools errand. And both sides play the game. ‘We’ have the numbers and ‘they’ have all the money, food and guns. Guess who wins in the end? That was ‘they’re’ fatal mistake. Expansion always trumps contraction.
The long and the short of it is this. Both Clinton and Obama were/are bums.
the way i see it, just about everyone who can actually become president sucks. rather than just saying endlessly that they all suck, it’s better to focus on particular issues (e.g. “obama is wrong to do x because of y”) than to apply broad labels to people (“obama is a bad president” or “obama is not a progressive”). the latter is not really all the illuminating (all presidents are bad, none are ever all that progressive) and isn’t going to convince anyone who disagrees in any case.
Should we start an honor rule that you declare your age when commenting on Clinton? (Me? I’m feeling older than dirt.) I mean, snuzy and Imhotep, were you there? It sounds kind of like you weren’t.
Any progressive was mad at Clinton’s compromises. *He had six years of a fully Republican Congress to deal with.* It is amazing how many socially useful projects he managed to accomplish, given that. (Obama: veto-proof Dem majority for two years : socially benign legislation : negative quantities.)
Does that mean NAFTA was a good idea? Hell, no. (Its worst effects aren’t in the US. Have you heard about a problem with drug cartels in Mexico? Have you heard about all the farmers who went bankrupt in the 90s? And were left with no way to survive except to go North or run drugs?)
But just because he did some appalling stuff doesn’t mean everything he did was appalling. Pretending that military involvement under Clinton equals what the Current Occupant is doing, for instance, is one of the things that makes me think you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I was 40 years old and full aware in Clinton time. I found him to be completely despicable and the original democrat sellout on welfare “reform”, telecommunications “reform”, and banking “reform”. He conducted full out undeclared wars in the Balkans, cruise missile bombing of “terrorist sites” in Africa that proved to be not terrorist at all, and vigorously carried out the sanctions in Iraq. The economic bubble did not burst under his administration, but anybody with eyes, except for his Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, could see where it was going. I can’t stand to see him, hear him, or as you may discern from this comment think about him, or his wife. His personal behavior was disgusting, arrogant and amoral.
I did not care that he was impeached, and I would not have cared if he had been turned out of office, not for the non-crimes he was accused of, but for the real crimes he committed,
I mean, snuzy and Imhotep, were you there? It sounds kind of like you weren’t.
what do you mean by “there”? i wasn’t in the white house if that’s what you mean. i’m 41 now (okay, almost 42), the clinton was elected during my first year of law school and the end of his first term and for almost all of his second, i was a young union lawyer in chicago. i’m not sure what it was about my comments that would lead you to think that i wasn’t following “around”.
and is the fact that you don’t know that obama did not have a “veto-proof majority” ever during his presidency mean that you are absent? (you probably mean a “filibuster proof majority”, which he only had if you believe that the members of the democratic caucus will always support a democratic president–i.e. it requires you to ignore the existence of people like joe lieberman, ben nelson, etc. AND even if we can assume lockstep party unity, there were only 60 members of the democratic caucus for slightly less than 7 months, between when al franken was finally sworn in on july 7, 2009 and when scott brown was sworn in for ted kennedy’s seat on february 4, 2010)
Pretending that military involvement under Clinton equals what the Current Occupant is doing, for instance, is one of the things that makes me think you don’t know what you’re talking about.
how are it different? it’s extremely debatable how these things stack up against one another. not obvious at all as you seem to suggest. my only point is that both presidents have a lot of military action, both covert and non-covert under their belt. i happen to have been against almost all military actions that both presidents have taken, but i do have opinions about whether some were better than others. but i also recognize that they are just opinions. plenty of people, can reasonably disagree. on the contrary, going into a discussion with the underlying assumption that everything the “current occupant” does is terrible and dismissing anyone else as not knowing what they are talking about, comes across as a little mindless to me.
We’re talking about the narrow issue of whether it’s racism that may keep Obama from getting white liberal votes, and whether it’s useful to compare that to Clinton’s support. Regardless of whether it was a bubble, it was still a prosperous time for most people.
Presidential comparisons, supposed as though the timeframes referenced were/are discrete compartments, tend to produce perfunctory, if not also foundationally spurious, debates. It is more honest to stipulate that there are common threads from one president to the next. The most noteworthy occurrence over the span of five presidencies has been the shifts among covert and overt, i.e., where they’re happening, why they’re happening and how much is going into those efforts relative to everything else. Agree w/Susie. You can’t really consider Obama’s record without looking at the bubble during Clinton and the continuation of deregulation under Bush. At the end of GeoII, we had the bailout. During Obama, the extent of the revolving door between FedRegulators and corporations is abundantly clear. It’s no longer about whether we need more gov’t regulators or more good will & corporate citizenship from industry. The truth is, there are only a few people who speak the language fluently. Therefore, everyone else is at their mercy.
I have a rather unfavorable view of the Clinton presidency but do give him credit for having the courage to campaign on and the political skill to successfully raise marginal rates for high income earners.