(Look smart, stay quiet)
First off, I hope y'all enjoyed the 4th.
I know she did. Even the most freedom hating liberal has to appreciate the fireworks and some good BBQ chicken.
Anyway, back to business. Apparently the Clintons feel it is appropriate to criticize Bush's semi-pardon of Scooter Libby (Check this flashback on Bush.) There is no Democrat less capable of criticizing Bush on this issue than Bill Clinton.
Peep the list of pardons Bill granted on his last day as President. (Wikipedia page)
Here are some of the highlights from the letter A alone,
| ALTSCHUL, Bernice Ruth | Sherman Village, California | Conspiracy to commit money laundering |
| ANDERSON, Joe, Jr. | Grove Hill, Alabama | Income tax evasion |
| ANDERSON, William Sterling | Spartanburg, South Carolina | Conspiracy to defraud a federally insured financial institution, false statements to a federally insured financial institution, wire fraud |
I'm sure Clinton's list of pardons had some worthy cases in it but I'd bet that most of it was bullshit. Granted, we don't know what Bush's last day pardon list will look like but as of July 2007, Clinton has no basis to open his mouth.
I know black people are contractually obligated to love Bill Clinton, and his legacy is only magnified by the abject failure of Bush in regards to Katrina and the overall country, but the shadow of Clinton's carelessness and hubris is partially responsible for the backlash Gore received in 2000 (even though Gore still won) and for the constant explanation and backtracking Democrats have to enagage in with regards to Clinton's shady non-blowjob related activities.
This bullshit tit-for-tat is why a Bush or a Clinton never needs to be in office again. I'm not equating Clinton's 8 years to Bush's 8 years in office. God knows the two are not equivalent, but the book needs to be closed on the politrix of those two politics families.
Hilary Clinton should hold down her job as Junior Senator of NY and Bill should continue his work as a philanthropist private citizen to atone for his domestic and international failures (Rwanda) as president.
Let someone else hold the reigns.
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Here are the differences between what Clinton did and Bush.
ReplyDelete1. Clinton didnt pardon someone in his own administration who was in on his own crimes like Libby is with Bush
2. Clinton pardoned people who had actually served time in jail or he pardoned some people after they finished their terms like the McDougles.
Yeah, Clinton's pardon were bullshit but Bush commuting Libby was like a mob boss making sure one his capos doesnt go to jail.
Clinton's history is dirty enough that he should keep his damn mouth shut.
ReplyDeleteI think pardoning someone in your own administration is a lot worse and implies a lot more than what Clinton did.
They didn't want Libby to start snitching but unless you have a clean past you shouldn't start the mudslinging.
The difference between Clinton's pardons and Bush's is that Bush pardoned a guy to keep him quiet about Bush's crimes.
ReplyDelete1st) Clinton did pardon anyone who could possibly testify crimes which he or others in administration may have committed. The judge in the case and the Federal prosecutor all believed that Libby is covering up for someone else. Rarely would someone cover-up or go to jail for a person who is under them, but will cover-up for a superior. Let's see, who was Libby's boss or bosses? You guessed it, the Vice-President and then the President. So the outrage is that the president and his vice-president essentially closed the lid on all the criminality they may have committed by simply paying Scooter Libby for his silence. Bill Clinton never did that. Following this President's example, a President could order all kinds of illegal and corrupt activities and just promise his underlings that he will see that they don't go to jail. Can you imagine what crimes could come forth from this illogical pursuit of power for evil ends?
ReplyDelete2nd) This president never pardoned or commutted the sentence of anyone while he was governor and denied the claims for petition for thousands of people since he was president. The fact that he intervened in a high-profile case where crimes eminated from the White House is a new abuse of power. The only other President to do so in modern history was Gerald Ford who pardoned Richard Nixon. Lying to a grand jury about who leaked the name of a CIA operative is not the same as commuting the sentence of someone who engaged in corporate corruption, or embezzlement or even murder. Here what you have is the undoing of years of senstive secret and national security interest. People died when Mrs. Plame's cover was blown, and our enemies learned the inner-workings of how our foreign intellegence works. Additionally, what makes this all the more evil is the reason why Mrs. Plame was outted in the first place, which is a greater crime. The President, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and his wicked deputy Paul Wolfowitz were looking for reasons to justify going to war with Iraq. One claim that they made is that Iraq was trying to acquire Uranium from the African Country of Niger. Just like their other claims about Iraq's weapons of Mass Destruction, this too was a lie. So, Ambassodor Joe Wilson (Mrs. Plame's Husband) went to Niger to check out this story. He rightly found that it too was a lie. He wrote a column in the New York Times saying that the administration was lying. To discredit him, someone told Robert Novak and Judith Miller that Mr. Wilson should not be believed because he was getting false information from his wife (a spy). So, we all believed that he was not truthful, the President went ahead with the claim in his State of the Union address, and we all (not me) believed that Iraq was indeed trying to acquire Nuclear weapons. Hence, we went to war behind this lie. Now it is important to know who leaked that information, who twisted the intellegence, and who led us into this mess in Iraq. We won't know will we? The man with the answers won't talk. When he was ordered to do so, he lied under oath to the grand jury that was trying to find out who did what. He was tried and convicted for doing so, and proably would have sung like a bird in order to get out of jail. But no need too, the President stopped all that singing from prison by seeing that he doesn't go there in the first place. This is not a communtation, it is obstruction of justice! Bill Clinton didn't do that!
All over this country and every day, prosecutors use prison or the offer of shorter prison stays in order to extract information from criminals about their superiors. Rappers have gone to jail recently for lying to juries. Paris Hilton went to jail for 21 days for DUI. Scooty helped lead a nation into a war that will go down in histoy as the greatest military disaster in the HISTORY of this country. Just remember, everyday that we debate the political ramifications of Scooter Libby's commutation, people are dying in Iraq. 4,000 are dead now, over 30,000 have returned with mangled bodies and minds, we are going bankrupt morally and finacially; our enemies are emboldened, our friends are alienated, and we are despised the world-over.