Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cody andre who wrote (41540)	4/3/1999 8:58:00 PM
From: nuke44	Respond to of 67261

If you only knew the byzantine workings of the city of Atlanta government (known locally as the Maynard Mafia) then you would have no doubt that bribes, both to and from China and the DNC took place. I wouldn't be surprised if current Mayor Bill Campbell hasn't sold the rights to the Chinese to obliterate the Confederate memorial on Stone Mountain (The world's largest sculpture, no shit) in Atlanta's suburbs and replace it with a sculpture of Mao. It's no wonder that Bill Campbell is being touted in some camps as Al Gore's running mate in 2000.

To: cody andre who wrote (41540)	4/3/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: JBL	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Another Miracle : Maureen Dowd, opens her eyes and sees (some) light.... Character now matters. What a hypocrite. Yuppie Foxhole Washington Post 4/4/99 Maureen Dowd The moment we've been dreading has arrived. Put down that Restoration Hardware penguin cocktail shaker. Climb out of that Pottery Barn French Deco leather club chair. Finish up that echinacea-flavored focaccia. Drop that titanium driver. (That means you, Mr. President.) Yuppies are going to war. The most self-indulgent generation in history is being asked to sacrifice by the most self-indulgent Commander in Chief in history. The free-lunch President is trying his best to give free-lunch Americans a free-lunch war. He certainly doesn't want to spoil the party. So he has turned to the most Clintonian of all instruments of war: air power. As the military expert Eliot Cohen has observed: "Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment." During the Monica mess, the country engaged in an exhaustive and exhausting debate about what matters in a leader. The consensus seemed to be that policies do, not peccadilloes. And that character is amorphous; there is public character and private character, and only public character counts. That formulation worked when all the President who survived impeachment had to do was oversee a wildly escalating stock market. He may act like a dope sometimes, we thought, but he'll do. Now, however, he is suddenly overseeing a wildly escalating war. And war is serious. It requires that we embrace the kinds of values that Bill Clinton doesn't exemplify. In the ghastly light of bombs dropping on Belgrade, the post-Monica conclusions about character look glib. As America struggles to fathom Kosovo and as the wobbly Clinton team struggles to decide on a policy, we're required to make a moral assessment of the person running the war. The President is asking America to get involved in a conflict for moral, rather than strategic, reasons. He is proposing to lead us morally. This inspires admiration. But, even those who really like Mr. Clinton would admit he does not inspire that "we're all in this together, we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we shall never surrender" sort of loyalty. He seems lacking in passion and lacking in depth when he tries to explain our involvement. In June 1995, he suggested that the violence in the region was too ingrained to bother about. "Their enmities," he said before we entered the Bosnian conflict, "go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years." But last week, he said the opposite. "Now, at the time, a lot of people said: 'Well, there's nothing you can do about it, Mr. President. That's the way those people are. They've been fighting for hundreds of years.' . . . And I found out that in fact they had been fighting on and off for hundreds of years, but there was more off than on. And it was an insult to them to say that somehow they were intrinsically made to murder one another. That was the excuse used by countries and leaders for too long -- well, they're just that way." The President who is always most concerned with rescuing himself is now trying to rescue the Kosovar Albanians. He may have a conflict of interest if he sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the same time. Usually war entails old men sending young men off to die. But this time, the young men in uniform seem like the adults being sent off to fight by the child-man in the White House. In his self-pitying interview with Dan Rather, Mr. Clinton compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela. But he came across like a kid trying on the clothes of his elders, and betters. He wants, as usual, to have it all. In this instance, that means war without death. Who's against that? The problem is, it doesn't exist. Instead of tipping off the villains in Belgrade that he was only willing to fight an air war, the President should have approached the conflict with the same bravado he showed when Dick Morris told him that polling indicated he should not go public with a confession about Monica. According to Mr. Morris, Mr. Clinton replied, "Well, we just have to win, then." If the President had thought of Kosovo as a primary state, he might have mustered the burning determination needed to scare Slobodan Milosevic. Looking at hordes of wretched Kosovar refugees on the borders, I think only one thought: Well, Mr. President, we just have to win, then. Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company