Bill Clinton: Classic or Dud?

^^^ reminiscent

no way is clinton the smartest pres since jefferson

main similarity is they both banged the hired help

not sure what qualifies Jefferson as "smartest" to be honest.

He had some novel political ideas he cribbed from Montesquieu and the Greeks, was the ideal generalist, was our best president-as-writer until Lincoln, and served great wine at dinner. That's enough.

where are the shades?

main similarity is they both banged the hired help

Sally Hemmings did not receive an annual merit raise.

that walrus has not banged that dancing dude, you guys are fucking gross

they've got a nice rapport

jefferson was the best political thinker ever to be pres (except possibly madison), and certainly one of the greatest democratic philosophers who ever lived -- i think that puts him well ahead of anyone who's been president in, like, a hundred years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/mar/26/tony-blair-biopic-peter-morgan

Quaid as Clinton? I don't think I see it.

randy or dennis?

ok, two things

i.

The Clintons have always excited passions disproportionate to their very modest talents as creative politicians. Looking back across the Nineties at the frenzied Republican onslaughts on the couple, one can only wag one's head in bemusement at the Right's hysteria. Why did they consume so much energy in savaging a pair who had learned conclusively from their earlier upsets in Arkansas that you don't get ahead by offending the powerful, starting with the timber and chicken barons who controlled that backward and impoverished state?

To be fair on Bill and Hillary, beyond some ritual freshets of campaign rhetoric in primary season they have never advertised themselves as anything other than reliable guardians of the basic Business Round Table agenda that defines the programmatic vision of 99.9 per cent of all American politicians....

No one has yet written particularly well about the Clintons, probably because the appropriate tone--Mencken's comic savagery--was devalued by Bill's assailants on the right. Obsessed by Bush, the liberals cannot see Clinton for the light-weight scoundrel he was and have reinvented his terms in the White House as a golden age, whose possible sequel under the aegis of President Hillary Clinton they eagerly await.

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09292007.html

― Dr Morbius, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 4:40 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ii.

the last time i read mencken's obit of william jennings bryan i sort of wished mencken had lived in a different era so he could've written the exact same thing - only about someone else. bryan was really a great man compared to the shitheads we get these days.

― J.D., Wednesday, October 3, 2007 1:15 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fun fact guys i am a descendant of william jennings bryan @_@

NY Times having this fucking war criminal/mass murderer write about Timothy McVeigh on the OKCity anniversary is the height of hilarity.

George Steph called him an....Elder Statesman the other Sunday.

can't imagine a worldview where bill clinton is a major part of the world's problems tbh.

not any more!

(that's why Bam's in the 1600)

it's the start of the 1990s revival ...

from a historic perspective, bill clinton was off the heezy

For . . . being proably the most intelligent president since Jefferson Classic

i believe you're forgetting about president millard fillmore!

that guy was so smart he didn't even need a vice-president.

clinton had to recruit the guy who invented the internet to be his vice-president.

Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson were also pretty damn smart fellows ... so take that attribute for whatever you think it's worth.

Hoover wasn't smart enough to keep from running for president.

I liked how effectively he trolled Republicans

otherwise what a useless fascist he was imo

not to get all gabbneb here, but i still stand behind this 7-year-old post:

This thread should be revived.
Clinton is looking better and better every day, no? Best President we had since Truman if you ask me.

― Tad (llamasfur), Wednesday, October 9, 2002 2:15 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNoN403tXU4

bill clinton was great
for me to poop on

ban cankles

RIP

his rep is downgraded b/c of the role his administration played in setting the stage for our current economic shitbin ... though that's kind of like blaming Eisenhower for everything that went wrong in Vietnam.

Ehhh not quite accurate. The existence of another depression earlier in the century should have warned Rubin, Sumners, et al against the perils of deregulation and gutting Glass-Stegall. Meanwhile not all of Eisenhower's indefensible proxy wars in Third World countries blew up in our faces.

Yeah, so back when the economy was first blowing up ppl were saying "This is Clinton's fault. He passed some housing act in 1996." Didn't he also have a republican senate & congress during this time?

for all his flaws Eisenhower is probably the best post-WWII president actually.

nafta sure was awesome for the american worker

can someone inform me on dennis perrin's views on bill clinton? i'm at the edge of my seat here

clinton as the least-worst post-truman president seems pretty reasonable to me.

Yeah, so back when the economy was first blowing up ppl were saying "This is Clinton's fault. He passed some housing act in 1996." Didn't he also have a republican senate & congress during this time?

well, i was getting at Clinton's appointments of Summers and Rubin and not the wingnut blather about lending to lower-income people.

but yes, had the Congress not been stacked to the gills w/ Republicans after 1994 then it's quite possible that Glass-Steagall wouldn't have been repealed or Phil Gramm's sneaky-ass shenanigans that kept derivatives unregulated.

... or Phil Gramm's sneaky-ass shenanigans that kept derivatives unregulated would never have been passed (i meant to say).

Bosnian blood-red

being the best prez since freaking truman isn't exactly an honor

that wd still probably be LBJ over GHWB

(both killers too, obv, tho not on Truman's savage scale)

morbs i'm betting there is no president ever who qualifies as non-war criminal, yes?

bill pullman?

i was gonna say William Henry Harrison -- b/c he was President for all of, what, a month? -- but then i remembered that he was a general during the War of 1812 and he killed lots of Indians (before he became President).

morbs:
so lbj's good deeds make up for him being 10x the war criminal that clinton was?

false premise

so then you liked GHWB?!?

Nader would have been awesome

^cosign