Blaming Bill Clinton for the Bush Years? Really?

I don't usually respond to articles I read online, but his one kind of pissed me off, so I wrote this. Turns out the Huffington Post doesn't let you post more than 250 words. Probably for the best, some people (ahem) can go on and on.

Here's the story from Paul Slansky at the HP about how Bill Clinton is to blame for the Bush years and how it will "be on" him if Obama loses. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?

And here's my (extended) response (I can't even find my truncated version in the comment section of the article. Shows how much I do this. If anyone finds it--under dluke--let me know what page it's on.):

I'm assuming someone already would have mentioned all of this, but I it's important enough to state again. First, it's not Bill's job to do anything for Obama. It's just not. Second, blaming Bill Clinton and the blowjobs he received while in office for the Bush years is absolutely absurd. I, as a Democrat, am offended by such an accusation. Let's not lose sight of who is actually to blame for the Bush year, namely, Bush and his cronies. To suggest it was in some way Clinton's fault is a joke. If you want to look to some Democrats for blame, why not look at the complete ineptitude of both the Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns. But certainly not Bill Clinton. If a campaign needs one person to put them over the top (as Mr. Slansky is suggesting for the Obama campaign, and I'm sure would be his explanation for the Gore "loss.") then some serious retooling of that campaign needs to be done. Third, having Bill campaign as rigorously as Mr. Slansky is calling for could easily do as much damage as good. I know many independent voters who can't stand Hillary or Bill and their praise for Obama does nothing for these voters if not make them think twice about voting for him. So, if you want to be as black and white as this piece is, one could say that if, for the last month of this campaign Bill does what Mr. Slansky is suggesting and campaigns so rigorously, and Obama loses one of the states where, had Bill not been such a strong supporter, Obama would have won that state, then Mr. Slansky and this whole article is to blame for the WarFest that would be McCain/Palin. Doesn't that sound ridiculous? Of course it does. As does blaming Bill Clinton for any of the past eight years or the next four. Lastly, "We forgave you for Monica, Bill..."? Who's "We"? You are definitely not talking about me. I have never felt a need to "forgive" Bill for anything he did with Monica. His response to the issue can be called into question, but that is not what is being suggested here. What is being suggested here is that "we" need to forgive Bill for the unholy act of an extramarital affair. As though "we" are in some righteous place to do so. That kind of speak sounds far too similar to things that come out of Sarah Palin's mouth, and I for one don't associate with the "we" referred to here.

John Cusack and Chris Farley

In an article in the Huffington Post yesterday John Cusack had some insightful and scathing things to say about the McCain/Palin ticket taking the horrid and criminal tactics of the Bush/Cheney years to a whole new level. Scary thought, but one that's becoming easier and easier to imagine the more and more these people talk...and by talk, I mean lie. Can you imagine looking back two years from now if McCain is president (or maybe it would be at his funeral when president Palin is being sworn in) and thinking, "Wow, I sure wish W was still president"? I can. I had no idea that this threat existed. I thought we had seen the worst.

But, you're probably wondering just what Chris Farley has to do with any of this. Well, here's a bit from Cusack's piece at HP:

Now, no one in their right mind -- including reasonable independents and Republicans -- wants to double down on neocon ideology, but here comes the "maverick" and his economic advisers to use the crises we face to implement more "change" and "reform" to the system by privatizing everything in sight. Is this what the American people want? When they are aware of it, the answer is always no. It's the same bullshit re-branded.

Remind you of something?

Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.

(From the 1995 movie Tommy Boy starring Chris Farley)

Replace "customer's" with "country's" and "daughter's" with "economy's" and I think we have a pretty dead-on description of what we've had to deal with and what we will continue to deal with if we let McCain/Palin shit in a box and stamp it with the Bush seal of approval, the same seal of approval that, as Cusack put it, allowed for "a fuck of a lot of innocent people die." All the while being branded and guaranteed as the right thing to do.

Bush's Impact Will Be Felt Long After He Is Gone

Ignoring the facts that opening up offshore areas to oil drilling will do nothing in the near term and little over the long term to solve high gas prices, and that the oil industry does not even have the equipment to extract the oil, the Bush administration pushes forward in its attempts to let the oil industry profit hugely:

Story on Guernica's blog.

In his book The Court and the Cross, Frederick Lane points out how long after a President is out of office his impact can possibly be felt by the lifetime tenures of the Supreme Court Justices he has appointed (three decades is becoming less and less an anomaly). Here we have another attempt by President Bush to make his presence felt in this country long after he is gone.

The House is pursuing legislation that would make oil companies dig for oil on acres of land where they already have leases. The opposing argument is that those leases don't come with treasure maps with X marking the spot where they can dig. It takes time and research to find and extract the oil. What this means is those companies aren't even producing crude oil to help the current gas crisis. Therefore, more leases will do nothing for the short term, because, as the companies have pointed out, it takes time, research, and resources to act on those leases.

So, what we have here is an attempt by this administration to continue to let big oil companies profit long after the presidential election this November has come and gone. If given more leases these companies will be allowed to continue to figure out where the oil is on their current leases (or not), as the new ones wait in the wings to go through the same process in the future. All the while making huge profits.

And then when the time comes (if the time comes) to switch to alternative energy, the same companies profiting now will be the ones to profit in the future.

But let's worry about the profits to be made off of oil before we think about the profits to be made elsewhere.

I 35W Bridge Collapse-A Question

Given all that has been & will continue to be written about the I-35W bridge collapsing in Minneapolis—from a Hong Kong paper’s front page to a President Bush speech*—I was going to try to avoid writing about it. Alas, I could not. I know I’ve promised this before, but I will try to be brief here, as I don’t want to repeat everything that one can read elsewhere. My only addition to the conversation follows.

From Merriam-Webster online dictionary for the entry "miracle":
1 : an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2 : an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment

From The New York Times Friday, August 3:
“Its one of those things,” said Anthony Wagner… “Five seconds, 10 seconds earlier, they would’ve been in the river. I think a miracle happened.”

The “they” he is speaking of are the passengers—61 in total, many of them children—on the school bus that narrowly missed falling into the river & instead came to rest upright on a felled portion of the bridge apparently against the guardrail (see picture here), thus leaving all passengers alive, & only some injured.

Let me preface the following by saying that I am extremely glad that this school bus landed where it did, & I have been struck many times over these last days since this tragedy happened by the fact that only four people have been reported dead thus far. Still, those are four people & sadly enough only more will be announced in days to come.

Now while Mr. Wagner may have been referring to the second definition of “miracle,” something gives me the feeling that he was invoking its more common usage—the first definition. & even if he wasn’t, the word will still conjure up ideas of a divine presence to the listener, or, in this case, the reader.

I, like many people from this area, have heard a number of stories of near-misses & fortunate detours & delays—a friend who had to turn around to change her laundry; a relative, at the time, frustratingly delayed. If you are from the Twin Cities you more than likely have a story like this. & these stories make us cherish those who could have been on that bridge, who were even supposed to be on that bridge when it fell, even more than the average person may look to loved ones when something as random & tragic as this event takes place.

In times like these when people speak of survivors who could have very easily not been so, they always seem to say the same thing—“a miracle” has taken place. I am unimaginably glad that no one close to me has been counted among the dead. But to say that this is a “miracle” implies that some people were plucked by the hand of the Almighty, while He let others plummet to the river below. To call the fact that the school bus was only seconds from a much worse fate a “miracle” says that those lives are more important than the ones who were not so lucky—let me emphasize that word, lucky. What did the four pronounced dead & the others to come do to not be saved, to deserve to be tossed into the Mississippi?

Nothing.

They happened to be in a place when their world, what they knew of it at that moment, literally fell apart. If the school bus had been taking up space on the bridge then possibly one or more of those now dead would still be alive. Would that be any less of a miracle than still having those children with us? Let's ask their loved ones & see if there's consensus.


*a response to that inappropriate speech.

Sound Familiar?

The following is taken from George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," 1946.

(If you're interested in words in general & not just how they relate to politics, I recommend the whole essay, which can be found
Here. It takes a while to get going, but once it does it's very good)

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

________________

A few clicks & scrolls on www.whitehouse.gov showed the following:

The President's proposed standard deduction for health insurance will reform the tax code to make private health insurance more affordable and to level the playing field so those who buy health insurance on their own get the same tax advantage as those who get health insurance through their jobs. For those who remain unable to afford coverage, the President's Affordable Choices Initiative will help eligible States assist their low-income and hard-to-insure citizens in purchasing private health insurance.

President Bush's top priority is the safety and security of the American people. Though America and its allies are safer since 9/11, we are not yet safe. We have important challenges ahead as we wage a long-term battle not just against terrorists, but against the ideology that supports their agenda.

"The men and women of the Coast Guard know how to navigate the storm. We're counting on you to help America weather the challenges that lie ahead. As you begin your Coast Guard careers, you can approach the future with confidence, because our nation has faced dangerous enemies before, and emerged victorious every time. Terrorists can try to kill the innocent, but they cannot kill the desire for liberty that burns in the hearts of millions across the earth. The power of freedom defeated the ideologies of fascism and communism in the last century, and freedom will defeat the hateful ideologies of the terrorists in this century."

President George W. Bush
May 23, 2007

The Federal government will continue to provide assistance and guidance, but the people of the Gulf Coast and their elected leaders must drive the effort to rebuild their lives and their communities.

"The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against -- that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. It will improve our nation's security while we safeguard the civil liberties of our people. The legislation strengthens the Justice Department so it can better detect and disrupt terrorist threats. And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers."

-- President George W. Bush
March 9, 2006

And just for fun:

"The world is seeing the promise and potential of the peaceful use of nuclear energy. I emphasize that word, peaceful use, because one of my predecessors, Dwight David Eisenhower..."
--President George W. Bush