Clinton and Bush: Comparison made in hell :-)

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

This is a rant that I wrote for another forum -- thought it might be of interest here too!

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I guess most people have moved on now from that original discussion. So I am simply going to address some salient points here, especially about keeping perspective.

Any time anything critical is said about Bush, the fall-back for Bushbots immediately is Somalia, Blackhawk and oh, by the way 17 Americans died and Clinton chickened out. If that doesn’t work, then out comes Monica Lewinsky, the ultimate weapon of the chickenhawk supporters.

Here are the facts about Somalia vis-a-vis Clinton: George Herbert Walker Bush sent American troops there to begin with, and I might add, when he was a lame duck for 2.5 months after loosing an election quite decisively. So, Clinton inherited a bad situation foisted on him by his predecessor . Immediately Clinton takes office, the military-GOP cabal comes up with these ginned-up charges of gays in the military and distracts the entire nation from any substantive discussion of the dire choices facing the country. The Clinton gang tried desperately to bring the talk back to the economy on the one hand and Somalia on the other. But I distinctly remember every Rethug that went on TV talking nothing but gays in the military and how they were sapping morale. If these uber-jingoists had any real sense of patriotism whatsoever, they would have tried to guide the newbies in town so as to salvage the national treasure and prestige from a bad situation that was precipitated in part due to their own negligence (in preventing their own lame duck President from making such a long-term consequential decision). In one bad incident then, 17 Americans, count them, 17, die and the suicidally self-serving GOP goes berserk. Back in 1993, barely months into a brand new administration, a situation they inherited has one botched military field operation , and the very crowd that was in part responsible for the situation turns on those who were handed it, and the media and public go along with that spin in their short-attention-spanned blissful ignorance. I don’t know what kind of a twilight zone we are living in, but it doesn’t get any more bizarre, cruel and ultimately self-defeating than that.

So then let us come to Monica, unarguably Clinton’s fault. How many people died as a result of this transgression? How many of Clinton’s cabinet members advised him against it? Did even Hillary Clinton advise him against it? How much did it cost our treasury (in an ironic twist of fate, we cannot even blame that unmitigably horrendous specimen of humanity Ken Starr and his 70 million dollars on this, since that particular rat began his witch-hunt long before Monica was even a fantasy in Bill Clinton’s mind)? How many people’s lives were ruined? What actions did the person most affected by this great sin take?

What is the common theme running through facile Bush/Clinton comparisons? A lack of perspective and a sense of the magnitude and significance of these transgressions.

Bush careens the nation and the world into untenable situations despite vociferous protests from Dems and others who can actually think things through. He willfully ignores even those well-meaning souls who buy into his misguided premises but are more thoughtful about execution. And the worst thing about him and his catastrophic blunders is that he is quite proud of his intransigence. Clinton blundered into private transgressions in areas for which he had absolutely no benefit of any counsel. May be you think we are all born wise, and make judicious decisions completely uncluttered by emotional/physical imperatives at all times, but I think that is a delusional state. The admirable thing about Clinton was and is still that he is willing to listen to other points of view and actual facts about any issue under consideration and make judgements based upon those facts. While the ultimate decision may not exactly be optimal, it is nevertheless somewhere close to being correct.

The essential difference is that Clinton did not let ideology or cussed predispositions interfere with every big and small public policy decision he had to make. And therein lies the big difference between the two – the problem with Bush is not that he makes these colossal misjudgements (unwarranted wars of aggression, bellicose pronouncements completely unsupported by actions, one-size fits all-situations tax cuts for every ill that ails society, amending the constitution for short-term political gain at the risk of turning back the clock several centuries, midnight signings of laws for individuals in trauma that the government has no business adjudicating, utterly pompous, stupid interference with science curricula about which he has absolutely no knowledge; the list is almost endless) but that he will not amend them even after the results of his disaster are pretty clear.

Ultimately though, the differences are not merely between these two individuals – they are merely larger than life epitomes of their respective party leaderships at this point in time. The judiciousness of the good governance approach of Clinton is exactly the same that both Gore and Kerry would have brought to their presidencies too, if the world had been so lucky. Though Bush does typify his own party’s current whatever it takes approach to grabbing and hanging on to power, none in his party would probably have been as proudly and stubbornly monomaniacal as him, I think. The coterie (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove and Hughes) he has surrounded himself with, is as ruthless, but probably lacks the political heft that he has, to follow through.

I believe that a certain benevolence and sense of the common good has to be at the very core of someone who wants to lead the most powerful nation on the planet. That is an emotional core that does not come from learning. It has to be active, it has to be passionate and it has to be the guiding philosophy of any national office aspirer. Not pettiness, not strident rhetoric, not unjustified preening and prancing in a garb that you shunned when it was your time to show up for a cause you believed in…in fact, these are antithetical to the very nature of a leader.

For this reason, it offends my very sensibilities to even discuss Bush on the same par as Clinton/Gore/Kerry. He lacks this minimal criterion for leadership, despite his repeated claims to it – my considered opinion of him after studying him for the past four years is that he is a truly unfeeling person, with neither native intelligence to give him a meaningful moral compass nor a willingness to learn that would enhance ones decision-making abilities. Common good? He does not understand and worse, he does not care.

[truedelphi]

1. The Bush Idealogues Worship Death

It's about idealogy.

The Far Right Wing Cabal subscribes to the belief that during a catastrophe, the bad will perish and the good will inherit the earth.
And if the bad doesn't perish, well, at least we can deliberately withhold aid. Or worse.

I worked for a man who I judged to be a gentle soul. Then I started reading one of the Right Wing (Far Far Right Wing) newspapers that he subscribed to. It continuoulsly hadd articles about how after the nuclear demise of the planet, it woyuld be up to the True Patriots to assemble and then go out to black neighborhoods and lynch anyone that survived.

I had forgotten this entire framework of thinking until early last week. Now I am haunted by that storyline - toss that rope up unto the lamp post, and pull the nigger's head with every ounce of your being.

Well, no one was lynched in NO. Although just how it would be better to be a young mother with a toddler and a baby, trying to get through five days of 110 degree heat and no water or food, I can't really say that that would be better. At least lynching is ove rwith quickly.

Can't be done. You need water. You need food. So although it is permissable for white teenagers in "The Day After Tomorrow" to smash vending machines and also raid a ship's pharmacy, when it happened last week, with the neediest of the needy breaking into stores and getting themselves wsomething to eat, and yes, dry clothers and dry shoes to replace the wet offal-garments that were water and petroleum polluted - well, the public was told that these were looters.

Bush and his people are planning nothing short of an ethnic cleansing.
And they plan on ridding themselves of the poor and the lower middle class as well.

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

2. My mind cannot get its head around...

this idea, but it is becoming too unavoidable a conclusion now, based on all that they are doing. Why would you be born in the best country in the world and think like these people do?