CLINTON REFUSED TO GIVE OK TO KILL BIN LADEN

BILL CLINTON ON INTERNATIONAL EVENTS

Former President Clinton has spoken out forthrightly about a number of issues.  I am not sure he is totally following the Obama administration line.

Former President Bill Clinton on Saturday sharply criticized Hamas for deliberately endangering civilians and using international aid to build a network of tunnels into Israel.

“I'm really worried about Ukraine,” Clinton said. His foundation's work has introduced him to activists and politicians throughout the country, he said. “I know a lot of those reformers. They don't want a hateful relationship with Russia. They just want to be free. They want to be a bridge between Europe and Russia.”

FAILURE OF "RESET DIPLOMACY"

From Michael Rubin at World Affairs.  Maybe Obama and Hillary spent too much time blaming Bush and Cheney than trying to understand Putin.  The issue is how to negotiate with one's enemies or rivals.  In addition the Russians (Soviets) have been excellent at diplomatic deceit (and I might add the Iranians, North Koreans, and others are just as good).  Americans diplomat seem to believe whatever they are being told at the bargaining table.

The idea that diplomacy with rogue regimes is cost-free is a relatively new idea, one that may sound good in the abstract but is less durable in reality. Policymakers often advocate diplomacy with rogue rulers and even terrorist groups because other options seem unattractive. As our recent experience in Afghanistan and Iraq shows, war extracts a tremendous price not only in terms of blood and treasure but in terms of national morale as well. The American public is exhausted by these conflicts and wondering if their price was worth paying.

Sanctions don't work because dictators don't care about their people.

Obama sought Russian cooperation in Syria, for example, to resolve a horrendous human rights tragedy, but for Putin, the only question was how to achieve an outcome that diminished American influence.

Putin is a modern-day Machiavelli, unapologetic about saying and doing whatever is necessary to regain the glory and respect he believes the Soviet Union enjoyed. With his tireless efforts to engage and pour emollients on fundamental disagreements, Obama has acted as a modern-day Chamberlain. Simply declaring the Cold War over does not make it so unless both parties seek a new beginning. Obama sincerely wants peace, but so long as Putin seeks the restoration of an imperial Russian past, peace will never occur. Hitting the reset button should not mean allowing an opponent to use diplomacy to wage war by other means.

This is the first author to link Obama and Chamberlain that I have come across.

HILLARY'S FOREIGN POLICY

Peter Beinart criticizes Hillary Clinton's foreign policy vision stated on the Daily Show and applauds Obama for having a more accurate vision of America in the world.  But I believe I side with Hillary on this one.  I sense she is trying to affirm America in spite of our mistakes.  Not everything the U.S. has done since World War II is bad for the world.  He goes on to accuse Hillary of siding with the right in America.

For Hillary, America’s current problem is that once the Cold War ended, we “withdrew from the information arena.” As a result, across the world, a new generation no longer remembers the great things we supposedly did in the past, and America has stopped telling them about the great things we are still doing today. Her answer: “get back to telling” the story of America’s greatness, not only to the rest of the world but “to ourselves first and foremost.”

Really? Is America’s biggest post-Cold War foreign policy problem really that we’ve failed to adequately remind others, and ourselves, how good we are? After all, George W. Bush told Americans endlessly that the “war on terror” was another grand American crusade for freedom, in the tradition of World War II and the Cold War. In his second inaugural address and other thundering rhetorical displays, he announced to the world that America would champion liberty far and wide, as in days of old.

HILLARY'S KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORY

In Illinois recently Hillary Clinton called Lincoln that Senator from Illinois. . .NOT.  Her knowledge of American history is somewhat lacking.

FIGURING OUT PUTIN

From the New York Times.  Peter Baker discusses how three presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) have tried to work with Putin.  None of them have been particularly successful.

Bill Clinton found him to be cold and worrisome, but predicted he would be a tough and able leader. George W. Bush wanted to make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.

Barack Obama tried working around him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an approach that worked for a time but steadily deteriorated to the point that relations between Russia and the United States are now at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.

On Putin:  “He’s not delusional, but he’s inhabiting a Russia of the past — a version of the past that he has created,” said Fiona Hill, the top intelligence officer on Russia during Mr. Bush’s presidency and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “His present is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly does he go from here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over territories and people? Then what?”

UKRAINE AND THE NUCLEAR OPTION

USA Today gives some background on the nuclear disarmament of the Ukraine.  In 1991 the Clinton administration promised that the US would protect the Ukraine's "territorial integrity" if it gave up its nuclear weapons.


To reassure the Ukrainians, the United States and leaders of the United Kingdom and Russia signed in 1994 the "Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances" in which the signatories promised that none of them would threaten or use force to alter the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

HILLARY PREPARES FOR 2016

The New York Post reports that the Clintons have an enemies list that includes Dems who supported Obama.

The Daily Mail adds more information.

From Time:  Then-Sen. John Kerry, who would succeed Clinton as Secretary of State years later, was among the worst offender in the eyes of Clinton aides, according to the book, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. Kerry endorsed Obama at a critical moment in the race, after Clinton had recovered from losing the Iowa caucuses to win the New Hampshire primary.

The Hill:  “It wasn’t so much punishing as rewarding, and I really think that’s an important point,” said one source familiar with Bill’s thinking. “It wasn’t so much ‘We’re going to get you.’ It was ‘We’re going to help our friends.’ I honestly think that’s an important subtletly in Bill Clinton, in his head. She’s not as calculated, but he is.”

It would be political malpractice for the Clintons not to keep track of their friends and enemies. Politicians do that everywhere. The difference is the Clintons, because of their popularity and the positions they’ve held, retain more power to reward and punish than anyone else in modern politics. And while their aides have long and detailed memories, the sheer volume of the political figures they interact with makes a cheat sheet indispensable. “I wouldn’t, of course, call it an enemies list,” said one Clintonworld source. “I don’t want to make her sound like Nixon in a pantsuit.”

HILLARY CLINTON

She hasn't driven a car in 18 years. . .must be nice to be chauffeured everywhere as one of the 1%.

CLINTONS & MONEY

For Maureen Dowd (liberal progressive) all the Clintons are about is money, money, money.  They certainly do not have Jimmy Carter's "heart" to help people or even George W. Bush's humanitarian concerns.

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker, Bill Clinton earned $17 million last year giving speeches, including one to a Lagos company for $700,000. Hillary gets $200,000 a speech.

CAUSE OF SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRISIS

A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows how the Democrat supported Community Reinvestment Act led to the subprime crisis.  It led to increasing delinquencies. Democrats and the media disagree.

FEDERAL RECEIPTS/OUTLAYS SINCE 1999

Things really began to turn bad after 2008.

 

And here is another article from Reason.com.  It is increased spending that is the source of the problem.

SUSAN RICE NOMINATION

There have been criticisms of her in the past.

A CNN article from 2008 discusses her involvement in the decision not to capture Bin Laden in the 1990s or help with the Rwandan genocide.

Terrorism experts blame Rice for having played a key role in blocking efforts to neutralize Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. According to Mansoor Ijaz, a former trouble shooter for Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden "overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan." In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002, Mansoor Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan blamed Susan Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden's terror network. Rice was also influential in the Clinton Administration's remaining uninvolved in the Rwandan genocide that took place in that nation in 1994.

And a 2001 article in the Atlantic by Samantha Powers is also critical of her decisions with regard to Rwanda. Evidently Rice has remorse for her involvement in failing to stop the genocide.  But the horrors were committed and in rereading the account, it is tragic that the Clinton administration was not held more accountable for its failure to act.  But today, I fear no one remembers the consequences of these decisions.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Others, including a few members of the Africa subcommittees and the Congressional Black Caucus, eventually appealed tamely for the United States to play a role in ending the violence—but again, they did not dare urge U.S. involvement on the ground, and they did not kick up a public fuss.

November 29, 2012:  Further questions about her candidacy by Anne Bayefsky and Michael B. Mukasey in the Wall Street Journal.  There are many other questions about decisions she made in her various positions.  

From Foreign Policy (Nov. 29, 2012).   The ghosts of Rwanda's genocide are in her past.

OBAMA'S NEW WELFARE RULES

FactCheck at WAPO gives Bill Clinton's defense of the new welfare rules two pinocchios.

In his high-profile speech at the Democratic convention, Clinton himself came to Obama’s defense, claiming that the change in rules actually would require “more work, not less.”

It is a complicated read, but Obama has changed the welfare reforms of the Clinton era.

BILL CLINTON'S 8 DIGS AT OBAMA

From Politico.  Most are from 2008, but one is from 2011.

NEWT & BILL CLINTON

From Emmett Tyrell, the conservative editor of the American Spectator.

How long have I been saying it? At least for 15 years, but in private I have been aware of it longer. Newt Gingrich is conservatism’s Bill Clinton, but without the charm. He has acquired wit but he has all the charm of barbed wire.

Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping. It is not as egregious as Bill’s, but then Newt is not as drop-dead beautiful. His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.

From the WAPO, "Time to Bring Back Bill Clinton."

It is tit for tat all the way when it comes to those two. Still sick, after all these years, of Clinton and his melodrama? Who can say that with a straight face and not be equally tired of Gingrich? Still feeling queasy about the character questions surrounding the Arkansas traveler’s sexual behavior? How does that hurt him in a world where Pope Limbaugh pronounces that it was a “mark of character” for Newt to ask his second wife for permission while cheating on her. If nothing else, Clinton vs. Gingrich might banish from campaign rhetoric all pious baloney about sex. Not a word could be uttered about Clinton’s impeachment, not with the hindsight that the married Javert of the House was at the same time fooling around with an aide named Callista down at the agriculture committee.

Presidential Reading Lists

President Obama's summer reading list was published recentyl. When it comes to reading, I am a bit biased, but I think both Dubya's list (and the Stranger by Camus is not on that list) and Clinton were reading more substantial material that dealt with decision-making and policy issues.

PRIVATE JET TAX

I believe in a progressive income tax, but my concern over raising taxes on the rich is that it can put people out of work and not raise as much tax money as expected because unemployment benefits and other cost consequences take place.

In 1991 the Democrat congress raised the yacht tax and it just ended putting people in certain states out-of-work. This is a post from 1991 from a blogger, but a Florida congressman was also concerned.

The workers at Cessna and Lear must be in fear of losing their jobs. And one could wonder why pick on yachts and private jets. . .why not a special tax on any automobile over $20,000 or a special tax if you shop at Nordstrom's vs. Walmart?

WEINER AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

From the American Thinker. Interesting. . .his wife's brother and sister are members of the Muslim Brotherhood (Sisterhood). His wife is also an important advisor for Hillary Clinton.

OBAMA VOTER FRAUD

It appears Hillary Clinton supporters are accusing Obama of voter fraud! A group of lifelong Democrats recently produced a compelling documentary allleging rampant voter fraud by the Obama campaign during the 2008 election.