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The original e-mail:
Subject: Clinton
He signed Gramm, Leach Blilley into law.
He signed NAFTA into law.
He got rid of welfare as we know it not for corporate
America, but for poor, struggling people.
He let sanctions continue to slaughter hundreds
of thousand of Iraqi children during his two terms.
He rushed back to Arkansas to watch Ricky Rector
be put to death.
He was watched like a hawk by the right wing
crazies yet he had sex with "that woman" which got
him impeached and destroyed what was left of
his presidency.
He was so weakened he could barely campaign for
that wimp Al Gore and the rest
is the sad, pathetic history of the last decade.
If he would have stood up to the lunatics who
beat him up for nominating Kimba Wood
and not caving he might have shown them that
he had a spine...but n-o-o-o-o!
He's a Dem and a wimp.
Hillary has much more testosterone than he ever
had!
Jacob
You're missing the point.
Until you can point to a more successsful modern Democrat, he's the
best.
You want a president who does everything the way you'd do it.
That's not going to happen.
Subject: complaints about Clinton
Hey, Bart,
Jacob wrote some pretty damning things about Clinton,
some of which have some truth to them.
However, of the eight items he cites, three are
just plain wrong.
I'm answering those three Bartcop-style: first
Jacob's statement in quotes, then my response.
"He rushed back to Arkansas to watch Ricky Rector be put to death."
The Ricky Ray Rector case has been thrown into
Clinton's face ever since Christopher Hitchens first floated that canard
in 1992.
Here are the facts: Rector was a violent felon
who had, in one night in 1981, wounded two men and murdered a third, apparently
over a disputed cover charge at a dance hall,
an altercation in which none of the three men were even involved. He then
agreed to
surrender to a police officer, Robert Martin,
whom he had known since childhood. When Officer Martin arrived at Rector's
mother's
house to accept his surrender, Rector shot him
in the back and killed him. He then went outside and fired a bullet into
his own head,
causing almost complete brain damage. Rector
was subsequently sentenced to death, after a judge ruled him competent
to stand trial.
Despite appeals of the death sentence, the courts
upheld the sentence, and Rector was executed during the 1992 presidential
campaign.
During the 1980s, when Rector was tried, the law
on a brain damage exception for convicted murderers was not yet settled,
largely
because the science had not yet advanced to the
point where a definitive corollary could be established for brain damage
and violent
behavior. Further, there is (or should be) no
dispute that, at the time the crimes in question were committed, Rector
was in full possession
of his faculties, a fact conveniently omitted
by Clinton critics. (See "Damaged brains and the dealth penalty" from the
New York Times
of July 21, 2001 for a typically disingenuous
discussion of the case, available
here
Similar claims of present illness being used to
give murderers a "get out of jail free" card have been raised in other
notorious cases
involving the crime of murder committed by formerly
healthy perpetrators, most notably Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who while
dictator
ordered the deaths of thousands of political
opponents; and John Demjanjuk, accused of participating in the Holocaust
and personally
murdering inmates of the Sobibor death camp.
The Rector case was used to smear Clinton as a
ruthless opportunist willing to execute a "brain-damaged" man to win the
presidency.
What those raising that claim never make clear
is that, during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, Clinton would routinely
commute
death sentences. So why did he not commute Rector's
sentence? One possible answer: there were simply no mitigating factors
in this case,
other than the post-homicide self-inflicted gunshot
wound to Rector's head. Compassion for Rector's condition at the time of
his execution
should not beget forgetfulness of the injury
he caused to two persons, and the deaths of two more.
"He was watched like a hawk by the right wing
crazies yet he had sex with "that woman" which got him impeached
and destroyed what was left of his presidency."
By her own testimony in the grand jury hearings,
testimony corroborated by Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky claimed she had
never had sex
with Clinton, describing what they did
together as "fooling around." Further, President Clinton was not impeached
because he "had sex";
he was impeached for allegedly lying about having
sex with Ms. Lewinsky in his deposition given in the Paula Jones case.
Any fair-minded
reading of the transcript of the deposition shows
that the tortured definition of sex the judge imposed on the proceedings,
a definition designed
by Kenneth Starr, meant that, no matter what
he answered, he would be crucified. The fact that any questions about the
Lewinsky matter
were not material to the Jones case and should
have been ruled inadmissable by the judge, hardly seems to matter to those
looking to cast
aspersions on Clinton; in fact the judge later
ruled that the whole line of questioning was immaterial, but by then the
damage was done.
"He was so weakened he could barely campaign for that wimp Al Gore and the rest is the sad, pathetic history of the last decade."
Partly wrong and partly right. He could have campaigned
for Al Gore; in fact he wanted to, but Al Gore's VP candidate was guess
who?
Joe Lieberman, whose sole qualification for the
post seemed to be that he got up on the Senate floor and denounced Clinton
for being a
bad, bad boy, when the rest of the party, not
to mention most of the country, was saying MYOB to Starr and the whole
right-wing cabal
that tried to turn the sad little Lewinsky affair
into a matter of state. The "sad, pathetic history of the last decade"
was caused by a
well-coordinated right-wing orchestration of
the destruction of the Clinton presidency, a project that Jacob seems only
too willing to buy into;
his post seems eerily similar to most anti-Clinton
screeds I have read over the years: a few meritorious points on various
policy issues
followed by the same vicious ad hominem attacks
used by the right-wing noise machine.
Funny how, at the end of the day, the lefties and the neocons all begin to sound the same.
Ann in Philly
a.k.a The Original Ninjalibrarian
I've found that people, left and right, don't care about the facts when
it comes to hating the Clintons.
Thanks for clearing up that Rector case - I didn't know those facts
until today.
Funny, we "had a right to know" when it came to Clinton's sex life,
but 9-11?
That was "none of our concern" - no need to investigate anything there
- and the Demopcrats agreed with that horseshit.
And yes, Gore would've won if he hadn't been so incredibly stupid.
He chose Kissyface over the best president since FDR and it cost him
everything.
...and to this day, I've never run into anyone who can explain NAFTA.
All everybody knows is it was bad so that makes Clinton bad.
People who are very angry and can't say why should wear a teabagger
shirt.
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