Bill Clinton: Classic or Dud?

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been stacked to the gills w/ Republicans after 1994 then it's quite possible that Glass-Steagall wouldn't have been repealed or Phil Gramm's sneaky-ass shenanigans that kept derivatives unregulated.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

No Eisbaer, I don't like presidents. I find GHWB marginally less bad than the others from Nixon onward.

they might be war criminals but theyre exceptional war criminals

New PBS documentary on Bubba.

What the film doesn’t do is give viewers a more compelling reason to go back and relive that epoch. The film hits all the familiar Clinton milestones — childhood in Hot Springs, Ark.; abusive stepfather; Oxford; courtship of Hillary Rodham; the Arkansas gubernatorial races; Gennifer Flowers; Travelgate; Somalia; Whitewater; etc. — without exploring the deeper happenings that turned out to have had a more lasting impact on the world.

the fulfillment of Reagan. deserves the hottest place in hell.

so much better than Obama, tho

does Obama get the second-hottest place plus eternal jock itch?

Clinton's worst policies had so many aiders and abettors that it seems wrong to pour all the blame on his head. The great frustration is that most of these allies were repulsive folks like Phil Gramm. And when the electorate turned in 1994, Bill just grinned, turned with them and paddled with the current.

But, as much as I hated it when it happened and cannot conceive the shallowness it implies, it is true that the electorate turned hard right in sufficient numbers to put a solid right wing majority into Congress. As soon as that happened, shit was bound to follow. Bill was just the Weather Vane in Chief during his second term. All the impeachment stuff later on just shows how freaking insane the nation had become.

most ppl opposed impeachment throughout that whole thing, to the point where right-wing pundits began fretting about the imminent end of western civilization, etc.

Didion's great "Vichy Washington" is the elegy for that sad era.

most people were opposed to the impeachment, but an awful lot of the pundit class (and not just the usual right-wing suspects) supported it.

USA pundits tend to nurture their sense of profound personal gravitas, and anything that might be construed as condoning the Lewinsky affair would go against that basic instinct.

It's on.

^^ Sounds like what they would whisper in the halls before a rumble.

What I figure a gr8080 presidency would look like:

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ht_bill_clinton_porn_stars_lpl_120524_wblog.jpg

Excerpt from Sean Strub's new book on Clinton's lousy AIDS policies:

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/01/bill_clintons_lgbt_shame_where_was_he_then/

not sure why more than doubling funding for aids/hiv research or more than tripling funding for aids/hiv care or establishing a permanent office of aids research at the nih is 'lousy' but whatever

The Clinton administration sabotaged HIV prevention and treatment efforts in other ways. One concerned intellectual property rights controlling the use of generic medications around the world. Near the end of Clinton’s presidency, we learned from a leaked State Department memo that former vice president Al Gore had exerted pressure on South Africa to rescind legislation allowing use of generic anti-retrovirals at a vastly lower cost, rather than paying U.S. companies their huge markups. Gore’s senior campaign staff included several people who had been lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry.

mere bag o' shells to Captain Save-a-Bubbas who can't read, apparently

"awesome communicator"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/george-w-bush-bill-clinton-joke-around-like-old-buddies-1.2759571

whatever it takes to derail the '16 Express

http://gawker.com/flight-logs-put-clinton-dershowitz-on-pedophile-billio-1681039971

Will his tombstone say "Felt your Pain?"

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/13/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/

dud

More often than not, the ex-president finds himself staying in hotels with nothing resembling a presidential suite; he typically overnights in Holiday Inn Expresses and Quality Inns. His aides say he's the least prissy member of his small traveling party—caring only that his shower has good water pressure and that the TV has premium cable so that he might watch San Andreas or one of the Fast & Furious movies before he drifts off to sleep. When he wakes, he often makes coffee for himself in his room.

http://www.gq.com/story/bill-clinton-health-trump-and-hillary