Replies to post #11 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Zeev Hed]

Fin, it does not really matters that she got "good advice" she had "real money at risk" and thus the profit is "fair". In the case of Rangers, it is completely legal for the Partners" to accept Bush at a low entry point, the question is what "promises" might or might not have been made in exchange for that entry.

Zeev

[longdong_63]

FinnTroll...Geez, you stole my words. Except concerning Clinton...you forgot White Water, Monica, Paula, Vince and various other characters that were in the limelight or ended up dead. Mrs. McDugal was the only women who ever helped Clinton by keeping her mouth closed. Enough said. I don't care what party they are with...they ALL have dirt on them.

[KyrosL]

It's a matter of size. Hillary's bribe was $100,000. Bush's was $10 million, one hundred times more. Bush was certainly playing in the major leagues.

Kyros

[goodluck]

Finn,
I would not for a moment suggest that the Clinton's didn't make mistakes, but...
take the easiest one first your comment about "trashing all the computers"--it made front page news when the Bushes made the accusations, but then in May of 2001, the GAO after a several month investigation found that it didn't happen--no evidence of any trashing. That made about page 14 in the NYT, the inside pages of a few other papers, and no news at all in most of the so-called "liberal" press. There were a few apologies on some of the talk shows (I saw Jim Lehrer make one such apology with Paul Gigot, who smirked as usual, I still recall it, and Mark Shields), but not many. The fact that you still believe it happened shows how poor the coverage was. I still remember Ari Fleishman saying he had no comment on the GAO report to the reports who were dumbfounded. "We want to put this whole thing behind us," he said piously. No doubt. The Bushites just lied about it. The PR campaign against the Clintons was relentless.

It is hardly the case that the Clintons had personal hands in "scuttling the security at Los Alamos"--Louie Freeh and others were very busy not doing their jobs while sucking up to Congressional Republicans. Funny how they don't sing his praises now. Of course, any faults in the FBI during his tenure there were due to Janet Reno, any good things they may have done (were there any?!) were due to his heroic efforts. I saw Oliver North actually say this on one of the Fox shows. Even his conservative friends were embarrassed for him.

"The crimes of Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom et al were spawned during the height of the dot.com mania. Business models patterned after government fiscal policy." Yes, well, try reading David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics for the government fiscal policies that these were modeled after--the Reagan White House lied and lied about their tax cuts and the deficits that they would cause, all in their greater interest of getting the cuts done and eviscerating the Federal Gov while doing it. Unfortunately, they created the deficits when they didn't cut spending commensurently with their cut in revenues, and so bequeathed our huge 1980s deficits and our current debt of trillions of dollars. They did this because they knew that the tax cuts would never fly if people knew the truth about what they would do, and they were too fundamentally corrupt to accept reality. You are right, "This crap didn't start in January of 2001", it started in 1981 or so. Plenty of 1980s scandals set the tone for the 90s.

I would fault the Clintons for not dealing the business tone while they were in office, but they were attacked so vicously and continuously for their previous pecadillos it would have been impossible for them to do much about it or anything else. True, they asked for some of it, they weren't particularly Washington savvy, but some of it was absurdly unfair too.