Reply #39: Ugh. This is like reading comic-book history.

[JoshK]

What's worse, the guy you are trying to build into a principled hero a la FDR is a corporate whore, who is now eagerly sucking up to the Bush family, & who has not so much as voiced a single peep against the Iraq War or the phony "WoT."

Among the many major problems in your essay, let's look at this:

When Clinton stood up in 1998, with a massive budget surplus waiting in the wings, and cried, "Save Social Security first!" he was roaring a battle cry across the trenches that had been there since 1932. .... Such a surplus would, at long last, settle the argument: An activist Federal government can be a force for good within the American populace....

This was why he had to be destroyed.

If he had to be destroyed for gallantly championing Social Security in 1998, why were the rightwingers trying to destroy him 5 years before that? And, if what Clinton really stood for was the principle that the Federal govt can be a force for good for the broad populace, why did he sell out to the corporations on NAFTA/GATT, the Telecom Act, Welfare Reform, & much else, way before 1998? You know of course that he was a Trilateralist while still Ark. Gov., & impressed David Rockefeller through that connection. Do you suppose David Rockefeller is a great supporter of economic populism?

Actually, all Clinton was, was a skillful whore. He was good at going on TV and employing the mannerisms and rhetorical devices of "liberal sensitivity," while pushing for a pro-corporate agenda.

One of the funniest things about Clinton-defenders is that they keep giving him credit for the short-lived budget "surplus." The surplus, dear friends, resulted from the stock market boom and the transient increase in capital gains taxes. The boom itself was helped along by people like Lieberman who voted to change accounting rules, so that Wall St could report falsely-inflated profits. This is not the stuff of real achievement. It's not like Clinton cut the defense budget a single penny in his whole term in office (which would be a principled and constructive way of cutting the deficit). The only thing Clinton did that deserves credit, regarding the budget, was the small tax increase on the highest bracket, passed in the summer of '93, without a single Republican vote.

And it was for THIS sort of relatively limited thing that the rightwing wanted to destroy him. That is: he only gave them 99% of everything they wanted. But they loathe anyone who doesn't give them 110%.