Tuesday, June 10, 2003

We Are Most Certainly Less Crazy Than Them

Like all the cool kids, I've been reading The Clinton Wars, and the effect it has had on me is very similar to that of Blinded By The Right.

I was never really a huge Clinton fan. To this day, I'm somewhat ambivalent about him and his presidency. He did good things, and he did bad things. He was undeniably brilliant but he did some really stupid things. He was a liberal, but he made too many concessions to corporate interests. He was a big kick-ass Democrat who brought the party out of the doldrums of the Reagan/Bush years, but his name is a bigger liability than it is a strength in large portions of the country.

What's funny is the fact that the more I read about the years of his presidency, and the years immediately preceding it, the more I like Mr. Bill.

There is some merit to the idea of judging a man by his enemies, and going by that standard, Bill Clinton was a truly great man - after all, if charlatans and scumbags, liars and thieves hate you, you can't be all bad.

There have been a lot of attempts in recent weeks to compare the behavior of the GOP during the Clinton years to that of the Democratic Party since Bush took over (most notably Jane Galt's reasonable-sounding but ultimately self-serving Jane's Law: "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane"). A lot of these attempts have been by Righties who, in light of information emerging about those years during the 90s, cannot with a straight face deny that the GOP and its allies perpetrated some astounding abuses of power and resorted to the dirtiest tactics since -- maybe -- Nixon. In order, then, to distance themselves from "that element" and allay whatever guilt supporting such a Party entails, they try to muddle the issue by saying, in effect, "Hey, both Parties do it, get over it and move on."

Aside from snarky comments about "moral equivalence", the idea that the Democrats have been equally devious in attacking Bush is ridiculous on its face.

Until a Left-leaning Supreme Court Justice clears the way for a viciously partisan Democratic Special Prosecutor to take control of a high-profile, endlessly-funded investigation that has already cleared Bush of wrong-doing and extend said investigation into areas that aren't covered by its mandate (and are, indeed, being manufactured and promoted by Hard Left lawyers with funding from wealthy Leftist crackpots) in order to force Bush to perjure himself so that the inherently totalitarian House of Representatives -- controlled by insanely partisan Democrats -- can draft and pass embarrassingly weak Articles of Impeachment (but only after illegally presenting waffling moderates, outside of the House chamber in a Democratic headquarters, with "evidence" that wouldn't hold up in any court that Bush was a rapist) - all enabled by some of the most factually-impaired reporting since Hearst's heyday and a television pundit corps that skews heavily to the Left, I think we can safely say that the "Devious Shit" award goes to the reigning champion GOP.

"But Hillary is a bitch!"

Mm-hmm.

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