antiquam

I lived through all this but , for one reason or another, it disappeared down my own personal memory hole.   Thanks to Bob Herbert’s excellent column in today’s NYT, I’m reminded why I was a Clinton Hater in the first place:

Hugh Rodham [Hil's brother] was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.

Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.

Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”

It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.

So class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame. [Emphases mine]

Yep, that last line pretty much sums it up.

I’d sooner see the Red Sox endure another 86 year drought than vote for Obama or McCain this Fall but — and I never thought I’d say this — thanks to the wisdom of the Democratic rank and file at least I won’t be assulted by the sight of Hil’s name on the General Election ballot.

For that, I am truly and forever in their debt…

For me, one of the most interesting — if completely unscientific — methods of guaging public opinions after a significant event is to check the most emailed stories on Yahoo! News.

This morning, I expected the number one slot to belong to some thoughtful commentary on September 11th; its meaning and impact on our national life, etc.

But the most popular story this AM isn’t a tribute to the fallen, or memories of that fateful day – it’s a commentary by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann taking George Bush to task for, well, just about everything.

Here’s Olbermann:

[Post 9/11/2001] Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, “bi-partisanship” meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, “validate the strategy of the terrorists.”

They promised protection, and then showed that to them “protection” meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11 is “lying by implication.”

The impolite phrase is “impeachable offense.”

Hear, hear!

It’s been a John Kerry kind of day. I think I’m in mental communication with the man.

Has that ever happened to you?

First, in a comment on James’ post here, I mentioned the immortal John Kerry line; “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Then, a few hours later, I was reading through news reports of the Emperor’s latest Iraq propaganda. In a speech to the Military Officers Association of America, Bush played the long-forgotten Osama card:

WASHINGTON – Quoting repeatedly from Osama bin Laden, President Bush said Tuesday that pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq would fulfill the terrorist leader’s wishes and propel him into a more powerful global threat in the mold of Adolf Hitler.

[snip]

“History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake,” the president said. “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?”

So my first though was, “Yeah? Then why didn’t you capture the sonofabitch when you had the chance and why does every neocon pundit tell us that Osama “isn’t important” if, according to you, he could be a threat on par with freakin’ Hitler?!”

Then, reading deeper into the article, Senator Kerry popped up:

“If President Bush had unleashed the American military to do the job at Tora Bora four years ago and killed Osama bin Laden, he wouldn’t have to quote this barbarian’s words today,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. “Because President Bush lost focus on the killers who attacked us and instead launched a disastrous war in Iraq, today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen still find sanctuary in the no man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they still plot attacks against America.”

Um, yeah… Kind of makes me wish I’d voted for the man. (No it doesn’t)

In any case, I’ve found myself saying. “John Kerry was right” far too often lately. I think it’s cause for grave concern…

When Michael Ledeen (a man with the finest of neocon pedigrees) isn’t hyping up a case for an American attack on Iran, he’s reminding people like me why we began to hate neoconservatism in the first place.

To illustrate, here’s a line or two from his latest column:

In any event, the first time I encountered the notion that Syria is really our friend was in the mid-Eighties, when I was working on counterterrorism. The synagogue in Vienna had been savagely attacked by terrorists carrying hand grenades and a machine gun. We had learned that the terrorists had gone to Damascus, and then directly from Damascus to Vienna. They had not stopped between the Vienna airport and the synagogue.

I suggested that we might contemplate doing something mean to Syria.

Ok, so the obvious question here is: WHY should WE do something mean to Syria in response to an attack on a synagogue in Vienna? Isn’t that, properly, the responsibility of the Austrians?! (Or the Israelis, for that matter.)

The United States Government should have condemned the attack and shared whatever intel it had with the Austrian authorities. Period. End of story. Time to move on.

It was, by the way, exactly what the Reagan administration did. (The above incident occured over twenty years ago.) But for Ledeen, it seems, American restraint in a matter that didn’t involve us in the least was, naturally, [get ready for it!] appeasement.

These are the people who are in charge of our foreign policy, folks. For the love of God, vote Democrat in November…

(WHO said that???!!!)