Bill Clinton

Imagine a simple triangle. On the bottom left is a liberal opinion. On the bottom right is a conservative opinion. At the apex of the triangle—well, that is your policy. Smack in-between the progressive left and the conservative right. That meant, in practice, moving right on key issues. In response, the Republicans have carved out a new homestead along the frontier of anti-government extremism. No surprise, really. After all, here was some Arkansas arriviste pilfering their positions and passing them off as his own.

William Jefferson Clinton, aka "The Big Dog," "The Comeback Kid," "Bubba," and "Slick Willie", was the 42nd President of the United States during the peace and prosperity scare of the mid-nineties. Clinton "ended welfare as we know it," introduced pro-business amendments to the New Deal, and achieved a balanced federal budget in his last three years of office. Despite his moderate, and sometimes right wing policies, he was still considered too far left by an increasingly extreme Republican Party.

He is the second POTUS to be impeached, the others being Andrew Johnson (first) and Donald Trump (third and fourth). In 1998, Clinton perjured himself when questioned about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He was impeached by the House of Representatives, disbarred, and fined—but not convicted.

He is married to former Secretary of State and failed Presidential candidate "Billary" Clinton. Like any kung-fu master, he didn't teach Hillary everything he knew in case she turned on him and ended up fighting for the other side.

Straight from the White House biography page!
During the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well being than at any time in its history. He was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve two full terms. He could point to the lowest unemployment rate in modern times, the lowest inflation in 30 years, the highest home ownership in the country's history, dropping crime rates in many places, and reduced welfare rolls. He proposed the first balanced budget in decades and achieved a budget surplus. As part of a plan to celebrate the millennium in 2000, Clinton called for a great national initiative to end racial discrimination.

"It's the economy, stupid!"
The above title was strategist James Carville's primary advice to Bill Clinton during the 1992 Presidential campaign. The advice seemed to resonate with the to-be President. Clinton was facing an incumbent president with approval ratings through the roof following the Gulf War. There was even an SNL sketch that featured a "debate" in which top Democrats tried to warn the American people they were the wrong people for the job. Clinton got lucky in that the economy tanked during an election year. Bush, having lived through the Great Depression and the 1970s, just couldn't empathize with Gen-Xers while Clinton was awesome at this. On top of all that, Perot entered the race. While he didn't get many votes, what he did was trash Bush in the debates and keep the economy front-and-center in the public mind. Plus, theirs was a Texan feud: Perot treated Bush like Trump treated Jeb!

Derided by Republicans as "the biggest tax increase in history," the 1993 budget repealed the "trickle-down" tax cuts for the wealthy under Reagan. This act passed through both houses without a single Republican vote. Throughout the remainder of his Presidency, market growth increased tax rolls to create a budget surplus. This seemed like a conservative move, but it was actually in opposition to the GOP's proposals to cut taxes to "return the surplus to the people."

During Bill Clinton's eight years as President of the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained approximately 8,000 points. Under Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, the index fell more than a net 1,000 points.

Party's over
We're a heavily medicated society. All the drugs we take: Prozac, Effexor, Valium. I thought for the last ten years, we've been on some weird fucking drug — the whole country — called Fukitol. What a weird fucking drug. And we're just coming out of it and we're kind of waking up. Fuckin'-A! It's weird: It's like you're going, "last thing I remember was the economy was working and there was a budget surplus."

First of all, the Clinton era was strange. The Cold War was over, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, electing the jazz-playing, bang-anything Clinton. Defence spending was lowered under Bush I and continued under Clinton, who stuck close to Bush's economic policies, essentially cannibalizing the Rockefeller Republicans. Silicon Valley was coming to the fore, and people were thinking in utopian terms. At the same time, the internet got huge, and the tech bubble (which would eventually pop in 2000, at the start of Bush II's term) drove massive investment and growth throughout the late '90s.

The Democratic Party was on the verge of dying out before Bill got elected, and he only managed to secure their prospects with the, which caused several blood-red states like California to go deep blue. Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, concentrated on a fifty-state strategy. One of the cleverest things he did was to network with community leaders, cops, school principals, and (most successfully) small business owners. His other bright idea was to identify suburban Democrats with "east coast elites", which hurt the party a lot. It is no accident that the Democrats collapsed in rural areas at the same time hate radio and Fox News were becoming popular. Bill's popularity masked a lot of problems that were bubbling under the surface, eroding the base bit-by-bit until only the west coast and New England were left. This all led to the, where Clinton lost control of Congress, including Democrats losing the House for the first time in 40 years.

The Clintons are examples of living long enough to see yourself become the villain. Back when the Democrats staked out a more professional class of constituents, they won over a handful of moderate Republicans, but the Republican Party circled back and picked up the millions of working-class voters who were left behind using insincere, identity-based populism. As Democrats moved to the right on national security and matters of intelligence, they certainly gained a few more conservative fans, but the right inevitably circled back and became a false voice of skepticism toward the "deep state."

Downturns
Clinton ascended to fill a void in this nation for people who want to believe that they are forward-thinking without actually risking their profits or hedge funds. Diverting welfare money isn't anything new or unique to the Tea Party: Nearly every state diverts TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) block grants to things other than welfare. This diversion started after Clinton's much-touted welfare reform. The law that Clinton championed intended for the money to be used for other purposes than just cash assistance.

If you look outside the US, the majority of countries with the highest standards of living have very strong unions and labour movements. For as much as Reagan gets singled out, unions really took their heaviest blows under Clinton. The manufacturing base of the country was gutted with a rusty machete, but he oversaw an economic bubble and ran out before it popped, so we pretend he was good with the economy.

Clinton made a big push to increase homeownership during his administration. The well-intended-though-ill-fated Fannie Mae, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the fiscal policy of Greenspan’s Federal Reserve were a huge factor in the subprime mortgage crisis: Those led to risky mortgages and the banks pulling insane insurance acrobatics to make up for it. All those bad loans started to default and crashed the economy. So, a strong economy in the short term, but absolute dogshit in the long term. Clinton was also planning to negotiate cuts to Social Security and Medicare had the Lewinsky scandal not happened; he and Gingrich were not as adversarial as the media portrayed them. It is a mystery then that Newt orchestrated Clinton's impeachment. They had to settle for deregulating banks. (In 1994, before Gingrich and Co. took Congress.)

A lot of big players in America got rich in the nineties. Clinton influenced neoliberal shock therapy, which dismantled the former social services under the auspices of organizations like the IMF and the European Development Bank, and transferred billions if not trillions in public money to the ruling class. The life expectancy of Russians actually declined as the free markets moved in, with hospitals being closed down and sudden medicament shortages due to the fire sale of state-owned fabrication facilities and their distribution networks. This, of course, resulted in Putin's rise to power, as Putin was aligned with Yeltsin, an exiled former government agent who bombed the parliament building and declared martial law (leading Clinton to praise him as the harbinger of democracy and stability).

Telecom Act
Clinton passed the, which gave cable companies a monopoly on broadband. You used to be able to to choose all kinds of different providers for dial-up access. It reclassified broadband so that it was not subject to common carrier laws. That's why America has terrible and expensive internet speeds compared to the rest of the world.

The telecom act had the added effect of wiping out independent media, allowing corporations like Sinclair Broadcast Group and Clear Channel (now also known as iHeartMedia) to media markets.

Hillarycare
Hillarycare was an okay effort, but, contrary to popular belief, they weren't really undone by Blue Dogs or the health care lobby; they were undone by their own technocratic tendencies. Bill Clinton thought he had a mandate for major health care reform, but he was elected with only 43% of the vote, and his numbers were dropping. All Congress wanted him to do was to submit to them a shortlist of priorities and policies so that they could get to work authoring a bill. Instead, Clinton hired a mass of "experts" who met in secret and, after many delays, delivered a 1,300-page bill to Congress. They didn't bother to reach out to anyone in the industry or in Congress before dropping this bill (Senator Ted Kennedy, who had been pushing for universal healthcare since the 1970s, expressed particular frustration at being left out of the process). They also had a difficult time explaining how the bill would work, how much it would cost, and where that money was coming from. One of the main selling points was that the bill was simple, but they couldn't even explain what they meant by that, thus opening the door for lobbyists to deliver their own spin on things. To make matters worse, the Clintons couldn't even get their own people to lobby for them. The AFL-CIO was enlisted, but they were lobbying for Single-Payer at the same time. The AARP was also enlisted, but they weren't happy with the cuts the bill would make to Medicare. Then, Clinton pissed off a lot of liberals by pushing NAFTA through, so allies in Congress were even less inclined to work with them; several congressional Democrats actually began to offer alternative health care reform proposals, instead of rallying behind Hillarycare. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell essentially took charge of the process late in the game, introducing a watered-down compromise version of the bill in an attempt to salvage something from the effort, but by then it was simply too late; Hillarycare was officially pronounced dead on September 26, 1994. The Republicans proceeded to seize control of both chambers of Congress in the 1994 midterms, control which they maintained for the duration of the Clinton presidency, which was the final nail in the coffin for the proposal.

Not coincidentally, the bill was pushed by his wife, who headed the task force of "experts", despite the fact she wasn't elected to anything and thus had an infinitely worse claim to a mandate. Hillary was the Javanka of the nineties.

Casus belli


The fall of the USSR helped lead to the Yugoslav Wars, in which the former federation of Yugoslavia melted down into a series of ethnic cleansing wars between Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and eventually Kosovo. The UN was involved but largely ineffectual; the international community was just fed up with Milošević, but the US/UK tolerated him for a decade, even going so far as to call him a "guarantor of peace", then bombed his house in 1999. The Balkan conflict received press coverage but very little on-the-ground footage; most Americans knew sweet fuck-all about what was happening in Yugoslavia, I don't even know where it is on a map and what the hell is a Serbian? Clinton was already on his way out, and needed the media to look away from the Monica scandal anyway, so it was convenient for him to start bombing. However, Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies makes the case that the President's advisors warned him that his opponents would spin the bombing as a distraction.

NATO happened to be on the right side in this particular scenario. Kosovo has streets named after Bill Clinton, golden statues of him, and they name their children Tonibler, as in Tony Blair. Funny how it's now a common swear word in the UK.

Less commendable are the sanctions imposed on Iraq, which led to the death of maybe half a million children, and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan, which might have set the stage for tens of thousands of innocent Sudanese to die of tuberculosis, malaria, and other treatable diseases. Sources in the CIA believed it was a disguised chemical weapons lab. It was basically payback for an attack on a U.S. embassy. (Those same sources later assured President Bush that the Iraqi WMDs amounted to a "slam dunk" case.)



The Clintons played a big role in the destabilization of Haiti. The Democrats hated Haiti's former president, Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide because he promoted social welfare and leftist policies. This did not sit well with the Pentagon or the large multinationals who were faced with lower profits as a result of things like having to pay a living wage. He was initially deposed by a coup in 1991, and then "restored" to the presidency in 1994—with the majority of his supporters disappeared or killed. Due to term limits in Haiti, Aristide's presidency ended in 1996. The U.S. aided the military regime in his nation, and he was deposed again after winning re-election in 2001. Haiti is regularly accused of corruption by the State Department, and the vast majority of services are provided by NGOs. Not exactly the best case study for intervention.

Clinton also worked closely with the U.N. in several peacekeeping missions, most infamously the "Blackhawk Down" event in which 18 servicemen were killed and their bodies were broadcast being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu on global television. (Since then, it is common practice for the GOP to snub the U.N., since Somalia was a source of international embarrassment.) This caused Clinton to immediately pull out of Somalia, and almost certainly played a role in his later decision to not intervene in the Rwandan genocide. The optics of generally-white US servicemen shooting black Rwandans on American TV was a major factor influencing the decision. As a result, some 800,000 Rwandans were hacked to death in relatively short order with knives and machetes. Clinton has repeatedly stated that this is the biggest mistake of his presidency.

Clinton signed the of '98, which expressly committed the US to regime change in that country. It seems that after Rwanda and Bosnia, the international community began to fret over when intervention is necessary and justified. After Iraq, it has skewed back towards the unintended consequences of intervention and regime change.

Waco
The Branch Davidians were a religious sect headed by David Koresh. The government alleged he was illegally stockpiling weapons at his compound in Waco, TX, as well as sexually abusing children. They could have taken Koresh quietly on numerous occasions and didn't.  The initial ATF raid was repelled, with four agents killed. Then they switched leads in the middle of the operation from ATF to FBI, neither of whom were really capable of handling an operation like this. During the second raid, the FBI accidentally set a fire in the largely-wooden compound, which they deliberately let spread. Many of the burn victims had gunshot wounds, and the children were crushed to death by falling debris when the FBI parked a tank directly above the room in which they were hiding. Oh, let's not forget the constant blasting of Nancy Sinatra and sounds of rabbits being slaughtered to flush the suspects out. Or the fact the FBI casually used a leftover Gulf War tank to crush cars for no apparent reason? The ATF manual forbids such sledgehammer tactics, so they rewrote the field guide completely.

Bill was quite heavily involved. It was the first domestic crisis of his presidency, and he was briefed on the final assault plan and approved it. The first, ostensible reason given by the Clinton Administration for raiding the compound was to seize illegal arms, a stick in the eye for opponents of his assault weapons ban. When the situation began to heat up, George Stephanopoulos, the White House Communications Director, changed the narrative to one of trying to save the children sequestered with their families, even though child protection falls under domestic law enforcement. As we now know, U.S. Special Operations commandos (aka "Delta Force") were involved in the raid. There was even reportedly a pair of British SAS troops on the scene, though they reportedly held only observer roles. In theory, this violated Posse Comitatus (an act designed to prevent the US military from being used against US citizens), but the act can be waived in the name of disaster relief, insurrection, the war on drugs or terrorism. No one knows for sure if Clinton signed a waiver, just that the military vehicles and personnel were present.

Clinton's selective suspension resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including many children, and it played a role in his poll numbers plummeting throughout May and June 1993. Further, in this series of polls, it's interesting to see how radically public opinion shifted against the government as the nineties progressed. It definitely caused some blowback and played a big part in McVeigh turning extremist and bombing the Murrah Building. Right-wingers are intent on weaving those events into some 'the government is out to get the Christian gun owners' narrative.

West Schwing
And so they turned to the Republican Party and they said, “Come on, get the little prick!” And so the Republicans took out their rifles, got him in their sights, then turned the rifles around and went...BAM! You want to learn one thing from this whole fiasco? If you’re going to hire a lawyer to nail somebody, you don’t hire somebody like Ken Starr. If you want to get somebody, and he was an asshole, you don’t hire a BIGGER asshole! ’Cause then the bigger asshole makes the asshole look like it’s just a rectum. Ken Starr was appointed to investigate Whitewater. From there he moved to the death of Vince Foster and then Troopergate. The Lewinsky affair fell into his lap as it was becoming apparent there wasn't much to investigate. The Starr Report states that they wrung it out like a wet towel over a bathtub just to get the DNA sample.

Clinton had a reputation as a philanderer from the start but spent a lot of time issuing blanket denials. As it turned out, one of the claimants (Paula Jones) had become a born-again Christian and didn't appreciate her new-found celebrity. She sued Clinton and, in order to show a pattern of behavior, dug up a few of Clinton's former paramours. Monica had been moved to a job in the Pentagon, where she confided the affair to a co-worker, who advised her not to dry-clean a certain blue dress. Had Clinton not fallen for the perjury trap on a Saturday when he was deposed, he would not have been impeached, because eatin' ain't cheatin' having an affair isn't against the law. (Bill was probably more afraid of Hillary than impeachment.)

Republicans today refer to Clinton as a "sexual predator" (funny because they later elected an actual one) and claim that Democrats bullied Monica into silence (a claim brought forth recently by Lewinsky herself in a Vanity Fair article), forgetting that it was clear that Paula Jones' claim of assault was bogus. Starr spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in a multi-year, stringent investigation of Bill's personal and professional life, and found nothing to prove that Bill was any kind of rapist, or that the Clintons covered anything up. Republicans thought they had a strong case to impeach Clinton and remove him from office, but they apparently never read the Constitution, as it only allows for impeachment of the President in the case of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors". The President has the right to privacy just like everyone else: he is not on the top or bottom with the law above the law, but he is not beneath the law, either.

Ironically, the initial affair began the day Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress shut down the government over budget issues. Many prominent House Republicans (Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Robert Livingston, Henry Hyde) had their own sex scandals uncovered during this time, by Larry Flynt no less (which does not in any way excuse Clinton's actions). The GOP screwed up so bad that the Democrats actually won seats during the 1998 midterms, one of only a few times the party controlling the presidency has done so in American history.

Though history will marginalize it, the Lewinsky scandal did leave a stain on Clinton's legacy, so to speak; it sufficiently damaged him in view of the party that Al Gore, his VP, didn't include him in any meaningful way during Gore's own Presidential bid, which could be in many ways a mistake. When George W. Bush was elected, it was seen by many conservatives as a return of class to the office. (The very first thing that GWB did was to announce that the 'W's had all been removed from all keyboards, that there were jizz stains all over, and that Bill Clinton had released Porn Bombs all over the White House.)

Conspiracies
Democrats want to act indignant about Vince Foster/Benghazi/Pizzagate/Seth Rich and people who bought into it. But is it really surprising when your former President is buddies with multiple sex criminals   (along with shady-ass John Podesta), has a history of bad business deals,  the whole quid-pro-quo sinecure for sex thing that liberals spun as "consenting sex between adults",  stands accused of multiples rapes, and is proven to have cheated on his wife a ton? When your moral barometer is that broken, people are going to assume the worst.

Vince Foster
In 1993, former White House aide Vince Foster committed suicide. This set off the wingnuts and they dove straight into conspiracy-land. Joseph Farah, before he was a birther-enabler, squawked about a bunch of "magic bullet" theories that supposedly proved Foster was murdered. Most of the theories speculated only about Foster being whacked by Clinton, but there is an ever-growing "Clinton body bags" circulating around the world of e-mail forwards.

Philosophical ponderings


This impeachment trial gave us the infamous quote "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

When confronted with allegations that he had engaged in sexual improprieties, Clinton argued that while Monica Lewinsky had engaged in sexual relations, he did not:

[I]f the deponent is the person who has oral sex performed on him, then the contact is with — not with anything on that list, but with the lips of another person. It seems to be self-evident that that's what it is... Let me remind you, sir, I read this carefully.

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" is.

It depends on how you define alone…

There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were.

Pretty Fly for a White Guy
The author Toni Morrison once quipped that Clinton was the first black affirmative action president. Onion articles from his era are hilarious, though.

Bill Clinton is the first U.S President to admit under oath to masturbating in the Oval Office.

Famous Clinton quotes
Fun fact: Clinton is a lifelong sufferer of laryngitis, which explains his distinctive rasp.


 * "When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." – Bill Clinton
 * "What's a man got to do to get in the top fifty?" – Bill Clinton, reacting to a survey of journalists that ranked the Monica Lewinsky scandal as the 53rd most significant story of the century.
 * "Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening." – Bill Clinton
 * "I asked him to do it because he was the only person that I could trust to read all 150,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations." – Bill Clinton, on asking Vice President Al Gore to tackle federal regulatory reform.
 * "Well, I don't have much job security." – Bill Clinton, in 1992, on why he still plays the saxophone. It worked for Tony!
 * "If President Reagan could be an actor and become president, maybe I could become an actor. I've got a good pension. I can work for cheap." – Bill Clinton, at a Hollywood fundraiser.
 * "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." – Bill Clinton
 * "I may not have been the greatest president, but I've had the most fun eight years." – Bill Clinton

His most famous - or rather, infamous - quote, however, is this one: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.