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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (3521)	9/1/1998 8:45:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 13994

THE CLINTON MELTDOWN ... For several years, pundits have been predicting the stock-market correction that now seems in full throttle. So why, we wonder, did the vertiginous slide in the American markets only begin on Thursday? After all, the Asian stock-market collapse began more than a year ago, and the now-toothless Tigers of the once-terrifying Pacific Rim have been bleeding steadily ever since. Here at home, there have been pronounced warning signs of an economic slowdown since June. The answer is inescapable: The meltdown of President William Jefferson Clinton has rattled investors, and done so in a way that troubling economic statistics and Asian crises could not. The president has allowed himself and the country to wallow in the Lewinsky matter for seven months in the desperate hope that he would be able to tap-dance his way out of trouble. In the past few weeks, America and the world have had cause to reflect on what those seven months of paralysis have cost. The world has learned that the United States has consciously but secretly acceded to Saddam Hussein's build-up of weapons of mass destruction, including VX nerve gas. The world also learned that the president is willing to take a stand against nerve gas; it's just that the Tomahawk strike he ordered may have blown up a chemical manufacturer in Khartoum where VX isn't actually being produced. That raises unnerving questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence. Two American embassies were bombed in Africa, and in response, the United States struck at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan - but seems to have made sure that the person who runs and pays for the camp, Osama bin Laden, wasn't there. This raises unnervingquestions about the Clinton administration's seriousness in fighting terrorism - and, in retrospect, gives credence to the cynical claim that the president only acted to get the Monica Lewinsky story off the front page. Which raises unnerving questions about the president's fitness for office in general. While the hysteria over the economic and political chaos in Russia strikes us as excessive, the administration's brain-dead response to it has only helped the hysteria along. As the ruble foundered and the stock markets began their plunge last week, a frighteningly haggard Bill Clinton rambled on about the similarities between him and Nelson Mandela. That same day, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright left for a visit to the former Yugoslavia - where the administration's suck-up-to-the-Serbs policy in Kosovo has helped contribute to a massive human exodus that might result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Albanians by exposure to the harsh Balkan winter only months from now. And as trading began yesterday morning, news came of a new North Korean ballistic-missile test - a provocation that was once so worrisome to the Clinton administration that it was willing to pay the Stalinist psychotics running North Korea a $3-billion bribe (in the form of food aid that never reached the starving populace) to forestall it. There's a simple word for this worldwide mess: instability. There is instability abroad in the world. There is instability at home in the workings of the Clinton administration. And, judging from the president's performance recently, Bill Clinton is himself showing signs of personal instability. Good time to sell? You bet. nypost.com