Reply #153: Thank you for your thoughts Larry

[Time for change]

and your tribute. I generally don't related to poetry very well, but yours is very touching.

Like you, and probably a lot of people, I feel a good deal of ambivalence over the failure of Democrats to hold this administration to account for its numerous crimes -- and not just crimes, but dire threats to our nation. I think my OP reflected my ambivalence on this. Like you, I feel that the Telecommunications Act was a disaster. Why Clinton signed it is beyond my comprehension.

It did seem quite paradoxical that Will would refer to Clinton as the most radical president of the 21st Century. By all accounts he seemed to be a moderate, perhaps leaning a bit towards the left.

I think though that what Will was trying to say was that we have to consider these things in their full context. In other words, he was saying that times are SO BAD now that, though Clinton's actions appear moderate, he was really doing about as much as he could to fight for us. How correct he is in that assessment I cannot say, but I think it's well worth thinking about, and that's part of the reason I wrote this OP.

A good analogy would be Lincoln, I believe. Though we now know that Lincoln very much hated slavery, he had to appear as a moderate on the issue when he ran for president. The slave power was just too great. If he had expressed his actual views on slavery he never would have been elected -- in which case slavery might have lasted another several decades.