Clinton's Place in History

November of '98, heading towards the end of The Good Old Clintontime, saw the by-now usual Sunday morning spew about the Clinton Legacy. Predictably, this took the form of gushing about "welfare reform" and his Crime Bill, but not a whole lot about the things that were really on peoples' minds -- like the Chinese takeover of American manufacturing, and stagnating wages. What we did hear a lot about, as well, was how well he dealt with the Iraqis, and his decisive action in his missile attacks on The Sudan and Afghanistan -- which turned out to have targeted civilians (as usual) and were timed so soon after his video testimony in the Lewinsky Scandal that it could've been the premise for a movie (what? wait a minute...)...



...which brings us to the real Clinton Legacy, the legacy of one of most right-wing and violent Administrations ever to be winked at and given a free pass by desperate, fawning, attention-whoring American Liberalism. Let's see... there was extra-Constitutional military violence against Iraq (twice), the Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia; threatening and dick-wiggling at North Korea, Bosnia, and Iran -- not to mention the military assault on the Branch Davidian outfit, with young children and elderly inside, right here in the good old USA. All this -- on top of assaults on the Constitution at every possible opportunity, most notably in the form of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which sought sweeping censorship powers over the then-emerging Internet and which was deservedly smacked down by the Supreme Court -- gave President Elvis Clinton a legacy that any modern head of state could envy, if his name happened to be Deng Xiaoping.

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Paid Political Announcement

It was Sam Smith, writing in his Progressive Review, who beautifully characterized the Clinton Mob as "corporate lawyers with their own air force", and nowhere was that more evident than President Bubba's seemingly random, shits-and-giggles cruise-missile attacks on Baghdad in the early fall of 1996, right in the midst of his campaign for a second term, and probably for some random made-up "no-fly zone" violation or something.

Enemy-of-the-Month Club

About this time, at the peak of O.J. Frenzy, I was noticing a pattern in the media: that of what I liked to call the "Enemy Of The Month". Didn't it seem like that to you... seemed like every other day, there was some huge hysterical alarm in the media about some inflammatory hot-button bullshit issue like rap lyrics, or heavy metal lyrics, or cyberporn, or immigrants, or the Iraqis, or "hate speech", or... O.J.!



Brilliant -- in a ham-fisted fashion -- when you think about it: what better way to keep peoples' minds off of any actual real economic and social issues than keeping their panties in a bunch about a constant parade of shallow, sensationalistic "issues" like flag burning, TV violence, cyberporn, rap lyrics and -- most heinous of all at the time -- teen smoking. For some mysteriously weird reason that summer, a longtime American tradition was being raged over as if it were an asteroid about to hit the Earth. Needless to say, much of this starred President Elvis all over the TV lecturing us about teenaged smoking, using his Baby Boom membership as a tired-assed "I know, I remember the Sixties" bully pulpit. Hearing the broadcast browbeatings made me ask any Liberal within earshot, "Did you people honestly think this guy was going to give us any meaningful policy reforms on medical marijuana or drug policy in general? I mean, f'cripesake, listen to the guy!"

The real, personal insult on top of injury came that summer, a couple of weeks after Jerry Garcia had died, when President I Didn't Inhale, in his daily radio blather, chose once again to beat us over the head with the teenaged smoking "issue", vomiting smarm and condescension over my radio at staggering rates, alarmingly making note of Garcia's death in the speech, finishing with words to the effect of "remember what happened to Jerry! Just Say No, Kids!"

Right then, in that very instant -- that very fleeting little instant, sitting next to the boombox on the beach, mouth poised over a fresh slab of pizza, gulls snatching fries off the blanket, airplanes towing advertising overhead -- I felt that I could've dropped what I was doing, gotten some clothes on, driven back to DC, and risked certain life imprisonment for assaulting El Presidente, just for the satisfaction of crashing the speech and smacking President I Didn't Inhale square across the chops, on the air, for using rhetoric so crassly exploitive that it set a perverse "Gold Standard" for crass exploitation, even for the Clinton Mob.

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