Bill Clinton

The CIA-induced Guatemalan coup and the four decades of brutal, torturous, U.S.-government-supported military rule that came with it precipitated a civil war in Guatemala that would last some 40 years and ultimately take the lives of more than 200,000 Guatemalan people ... In 1999, President Clinton, visiting Guatemala, candidly admitted, "For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake."

In the 1996 election, Bob Dole was the Republican nominee and Bill Clinton the Democrat. Dole was known for his personal stability and practical midwestern values. He was also a war hero. His strength was his ethos [character of the speaker]. Clinton, on the other hand, had a personal charm Dole didn't have. He felt your pain. And although he was a bit of a policy wonk (logos), his primary appeal to the voter was pathos [emotional state of the audience]. Clinton won the election.

[CBS's] 60 Minutes will feature 10 face-offs between former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. The history of political thought will never be the same. Think of it: the maudlin advocate of the "third way"—that is, the middle ground between freedom and tyranny—will square off against the acerbic former senator ... Now that's a debate the American people can get their teeth into ... Either way, there will be coercive meddling by the ham-handed state. So Clinton and Dole are perfect representatives of the political views that dominate accepted thinking.

Under the Republican Congress during Clinton's years in office, spending jumped from $1.46 trillion to approximately $1.74 trillion—an increase of just under $300 billion. Most of the 300 agencies that the House Budget Committee listed as "unnecessary" in 1995—those that were supposed to be "zeroed out"—actually received increases in federal funding by 2000. Some, such as the Department of Commerce, saw budgets increase more than 41 percent ... Spending has actually increased more rapidly under Bush than it did under Clinton.

Doubly tragic, Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, compounded the dangerous folly by hyping the bogus threat. Why? That might be a good question for progressives to ask possible presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who enjoys basking in her husband's supposed presidential successes ... Before assuming power, Clinton signaled his intention to be "more explicitly pro-Israel than the Bush administration had been." To that end, he selected Martin Indyk as his campaign's Middle East adviser. Indyk had been an adviser to former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir ... and cofounder of AIPAC's spinoff think tank ...

President Clinton in Africa was like Clinton in the United States — as phony as a three-dollar bill. ... None of what happened on Clinton's Africa trip was really about history, geography or morality. It was about Clinton's appeal to his political supporters back home in the United States, especially black politicians, whom he will need if special prosecutor Kenneth Starr starts indictments or the House of Representatives starts impeachment. In a more subtle way, Clinton was playing the race card as surely as O.J. Simpson's lawyers. And for the same reason — to escape the consequences of his own actions.

President Clinton says health care in America costs too much—that it's a national disgrace that 37 million Americans have no health insurance and that tens of millions of others have inadequate coverage. [His] "solution": a total government takeover of all medical care in the U.S. ... Under [his] plan, you will automatically be enrolled in a government-run "health alliance." ... Clinton's health-care plan will be financed by a new payroll tax of 3.5% to 7.6% on all businesses and workers in America (including part-time workers) ... You will only be allowed to select doctors from [his] approved list.

A major aim of Clinton's health-care plan is to change the way you and your children live including what you eat, drink, and smoke, and your sexual behavior. As Clinton stated in his September 22, 1993, address to a joint session of Congress:

Responsibility [for solving the health-care problem] means changing some behaviors in this country that drives up our cost like crazy and without change in them we'll never have the system we ought to have. Let me just mention a few ... We also have higher rates of AIDS, of smoking and excessive drinking, of teen pregnancies, of low-birth-weight babies. We have to change our ways.

President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ... today ..., too many people live in areas where there's no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."

Sadly, it seems that Bill Clinton, as much as we hated him at the time, was the last of a kind: a fairly normal and plausibly electable Democrat. In retrospect, he seems like the model of the moderate social democrat. Hey, he signed off on welfare reform, a capital gain tax cut, and decentralized speed limit control. Also, he at least had the wisdom to pull out of wars gone wrong (are there any other kind?). He cut government payrolls and reduced the deficit dramatically. Would that Republican presidents show such restraint!

On the eve of his 1992 election debacle, President George H. W. Bush told a Texas audience, "And tomorrow, you participate in a ritual, a sacred ritual of stewardship ..." Yet few of the people who voted the following day were making a statement of principle in favor of permitting the president to deploy troops ... abroad on his whim (as Clinton did in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere), permitting the government to waive the Posse Comitatus Act and use military equipment against American civilians (as happened at Waco), or permitting the government to vastly increase its surveillance of the American people.

Clinton and his colleagues are embarked on a course of global economic intervention such as no one has attempted before ... Is Bill Clinton not acting as though Bill Gates was appointed by the state to run Microsoft? ... In early October, President Clinton led 20 other countries in endorsing new restrictions on the international movement of capital ... Clinton ... called for worldwide economic regulations similar to ... the New Deal ... Strangely, ... Clinton warned against international capital controls—the very thing he had endorsed the day before. Is something interfering with his concentration?

Denis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil-for-food program, resigned in 1998 to protest ... the sanctions ... Seventy members of Congress sent a letter to President Clinton in early 2000 denouncing the sanctions as "infanticide masquerading as policy." President Clinton decreed in November 1997 that "sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] lasts." At the end of the Clinton era, Defense Secretary William Cohen bragged, "We have been successful, through the sanctions regime, to really shut off most of the revenue that will be going to rebuild [Saddam Hussein’s] military."

There are just two rules of governance in a free society:

• Mind your own business.
• Keep your hands to yourself.

Bill, keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. We have a group of incredibly silly people in the White House right now, people who think government works. Or that government would work, if you got some real bright young kids from Yale to run it. We're being governed by dorm room bull session. The Clinton administration is over there right now pulling an all-nighter in the West Wing. They think that, if they can just stay up late enough, they can create a healthy economy and bring peace to former Yugoslavia.

Didn’t President Clinton once promise that his would be the most moral presidency in history and say that the era of big government was over? ... Clinton is remembered primarily for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky — a comparatively innocent foible ... Clinton's supporters, however, say nothing about the Waco conflagration and subsequent whitewash investigation. ... Similarly, they do not mention the vast increase in surveillance against American citizens that he authorized or his continuation of Middle East interventions that contributed to the terrorist attacks of 2001.

The Clinton Inaugural was, of course, a horrifying display of a neopagan, multicultural, New Age religious left at work ... Slick Willie ... Hillary's co-president and ideological puppet ... Remember that weekend in August when Willie began his frantic and febrile, but unfortunately successful, drive to reverse his House defeat on the crime bill? He gave a speech in Maryland before the grandiosely named Full Gospel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. ... He said that the goal of his 'ministry' was to bring about no less than the 'Kingdom of God on Earth'! Yes, he said it, he actually said it!

[The] federal Brady Bill, [requires] a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns ... Proponents of the waiting period readily concede ... they see it as a first step toward further control of handguns and rifles, misleadingly called "assault weapons." President Clinton has said he wants federal registration and licensing of gun ownership and a ban on such semiautomatic weapons ... registration and licensing have been used countless times ... to carry out a wholesale confiscation of guns. The Clinton proposal, therefore, would put all peaceful people at risk of having their means of self-defense taken away.

Between relentless bombings and a mass starvation campaign that Madeline Albright has deemed "worth it," Clinton the humanitarian has presided over a man-made disaster in Iraq ... [He] carried on with Bush's war on Iraq, with an entire decade of sanctions and bombings. He attempted "humanitarian" interventions in Somalia that accomplished nothing but social destabilization ... And then came Kosovo. From Clinton's point of view, the timing was perfect to distract from the meltdown of this administration after the Lewinsky fiasco. But civilians in Serbia paid a heavy price for his peccadilloes.

As president, Bill Clinton managed to obtain Congressional approval of a North American Free Trade Agreement that was designed to make the United States, Canada, and Mexico more competitive in the world marketplace. But he failed to realize his campaign promise to reform the nation's health-care system, which critics likened to socialized medicine. In the 1994 midterm election his rash proposals not only led to Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House but also provided Republicans with an ambitious agenda for ... change, which they dubbed the "Contract with America."

Bill Clinton's unprovoked war against Serbia was sold to Americans with preposterous tales of the Kosovo Liberation Army's being freedom fighters, with absurd claims that a civil war in one corner of southeastern Europe threatened to engulf the entire continent in conflict, with wild and unsubstantiated claims of an ongoing genocide, and with a deluge of lies that the U.S. military was not targeting Serb civilians. Lying and warring appear to be two sides of the same coin.

Reason: You repeatedly call yourself a Clinton Democrat. What do you mean by that?
Paglia: I can't help it. I like him. I know he is a terrible administrator. He has very bad judgment in choosing staff ... But I liked the Clintons in the campaign. I thought they were a great power couple. I think that he needed her to be around him, because she is shrewder than he about a lot of things. He needs her to be like the mastermind, to discipline staff and keep him on a schedule. And I think that the fall ... came the moment he ... put her in charge, very hubristically, of health care.