brees, I may be overgeneralizing a bit, but as near as I can tell most people expressing personal hatred of Clinton here also go toward pretty orthodox conservative politics. The kind that equates "liberals" with "socialists" or "marxists". To take a rather extreme example, there's my old friend Rev. Pilch, who applies pretty much the same contempt to the broad American public that was against impeachment as he does to me, personally. "American are whores", or something like that.
People taunt me about Clinton in history. I posted one historian's take a while back, on the personal issues I don't think a judgement can be made independent of the Starr, er, process. Politically, I imagine, as another article I quoted said, he'll be remembered for downsizing the presidency, which isn't necessarily bad. I don't like Clinton, it'd be nice if we had a better president, and politically I more or less gave up on him after the health care botch in the first 2 years. He kept a lid on versus Newt, is about his best political accomplishment, but if he'd been a better politician, Newt's class wouldn't have taken over the congress in the first place.
In terms of impeachment, Clinton losing would have meant the Newt/Armey/Delay arm of the Republican party winning. I don't hate Republicans, I have nothing against GWB or Dole or McCain. But I don't like the Newt/Armey/Delay side of the party, I think those guys are nasty, and Newt's nastiness, at least, predates Clinton. Flame throwing speeches before an empty House for the C-SPAN cameras, right from the start. And if the Nov. elections had gone the other way, and the Newt wing had been strengthened, Gore would have been next, and then where would we be? The line when I raised that point, pre-election, was that Gore could appoint his choice as VP; given that Jesse Helms wouldn't let Republican William Weld be appointed Ambassador to Mexico, I didn't take much comfort there.
And, in self defense, a quick note on Reagan. I don't hate Reagan either, and I think the Reagan administration was in general effective in moving the country in a conservative direction. Reagan was a good symbolic leader and drew many committed people in the government. But there's not much evidence that he was ever much in control. The neocon propagandists can lionize him all they want, but real historians do tend to pay attention to the evaluations of people that were there, like Donald Regan and George Schultz. And Iran-contra was considered a blot by everybody at the time. Plus, to my knowledge, Alzheimer's isn't exactly a sudden onset, off-on disease.
Mostly, it's just time to move on, politically. Nothing keeps me posting here besides latent testosterone poisoning and seeing "civil" Neocon cheering on the various hate artists here. And make no mistake, the hate goes beyond Clinton, there's plenty of old posts from Dwight and Rev. Pilch on homosexuals that have nothing whatsoever to do with Clinton. I really should let everybody just stew in Clinton hatred here. In terms of my personal politics and reading of public sentiment, it suits me just fine. |
