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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (43001)	4/20/1999 12:04:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

Another Fine Mess by R. Emmett Tyrell During Bill Clinton's impeachment and immediately thereafter, shrewd Washington observers were saying ever so discreetly that the greatest fear of the Congressional Democrats was that once they got Clinton off the hook "another shoe would fall." Sure enough, within days of acquittal the shoe fell, actually two shoes, actually a shoe and a boot. The shoe that thudded down was the appearance of Juanita Broaddrick. In interviews both televised and printed she admitted to being the Jane Doe Number Five who had testified to having been raped by then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton. The testimony had been available to members of Congress during the impeachment proceedings. No serious observer doubted her honesty. The majority of the American people believed her, many of whom had not even seen her interview. The Congressional Democrats who maneuvered to acquit Clinton without even bothering to read the Broaddrick testimony are going to pay a heavy price for their dereliction someday, possibly at the polls, certainly with the historians. That two major news organizations had interviews with Brodderick bottled up for months before and during impeachment without letting Americans know until impeachment was over will also have historic consequences. Yet the Broaddrick testimony was just the shoe that fell. The boot was that of Slobodan Milosevic crushing the Albanian Kosovars. While Boy Clinton was responding with bluff and woefully insufficient military force, Milosevic slaughtered helpless people, ethnically cleansed most of Kosovo, and in fine achieved most of his objectives. Three weeks after our initial blunder into Kosovo the Boy President is still consulting polls, issuing threats, and holding photo-ops at the White House. In the last one I saw he solemnly explained to the assembled cameras how he was turning this war into a massive humanitarian effort. He will assist Milosevic in relocating ethnic Albanians so that Kosovo can be Albanian-free. He even has a 1-800 number for our donations to humanitarian relief. Its extra digits inspired him to make winsome jokes about its numerical anomaly. He chuckled as did his aides. Did Winston Churchill offer a little levity during Dunkirk? Did Franklin Roosevelt always offer a drollery during wartime press conferences? Particularly when the war was going badly? There is something bizarre about Bill Clinton leading a large military effort. To begin with, it is well documented that he is a draft dodger who lied for years about it and is still lying. Then, too, there is abundant evidence that he -- and even more emphatically, Hillary -- dislike the uniformed forces. For a certitude it is a bizarre coincidence that the Clintons are using the very same strategies and tactics that they so reviled when used in the Vietnam conflict, to wit, "graduated escalation," a reluctance to go to the Congress, destroying villages to save them. And is it out of ignorance or contempt for the citizenry that the Clinton Administration resorts to the words "domino theory"? Since 1992, we spoil sports have been raising the question "does character matter?" in regards to Clinton. Somehow the spinmeisters and Clinton himself have transformed this perfectly sensible question into an irrelevancy favored by cranks and "Clinton haters." Truth be known, since the dawn of political discourse political philosophers have related the character of a leader to his record. Clinton is a reckless con artist. The consequences of his recklessness and of his humbuggery can be seen in Kosovo. He did not heed his military's call for overwhelming force and alternative strategies. He believed he could con Milosevic the way he had conned the United States Senate. Now hundreds of thousands of refugees are suffering horribly in ill-equipped camps along the Kosovo border. Thousands more have been killed by grisly brutes. The Clintons' critics have long said that his defective character would land him into a serious foreign policy mess from which neither bluff nor his trademark shamelessness could extricate him. Kosovo is that mess. For the hundreds of thousands suffering there it is tragic that Americans did not rid themselves of this uniquely corrupt President long ago. Another of the bizarre aspects of this presidency is that Clinton's critics have almost always been vindicated but never been persuasive to enough American voters to save us from our present ignominy. So the Kosovars will suffer as we pray that that things do not get worse. In the meantime it is left to Senator John McCain to rally the nation, and that adds to the bizarrerie of it all. While Bill Clinton was dodging the draft, Lieutenant Commander McCain was being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison. His father commanded the United States' operations in the Pacific. When the North Vietnamese sought a propaganda coup in freeing him, McCain chose more torture. He recognized that their offer was in violation of the United States military Code of Conduct. Code of Conduct? Whatever might that mean?