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The Clinton Catastrophe

Posted on 10. Sep, 2012 by in Analysis, Politics

Clinton’s barefaced fabrications just piled one on top of another. Obama cut four trillion from the deficit. Suuuure. Obama created 4.5 million jobs. Where, on Mars? Obama created 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Maybe in China. Inflation in medical costs is going down because of Obamacare. Or perhaps it is the miserable economy?

But why does it matter what Clinton says, anyway? Sure, he’s a former president, but Democrats weren’t lining up around the block to hear Carter speak in years past. I believe that Clinton’s drawing power stems from the myth that he was responsible for the impressive financial success of the 1990s.

It would be difficult to be more wrong.

First off, I would like to say that I personally do not believe that presidents have as much say over the course of the economy as we would like to believe. They do not write tax code or federal budgets, so how could they single-handedly control something like that? Still, both parties like to tout that their guy was responsible for the country’s financial success, and at the convention Bill Clinton was hailed as a demigod for his supposed fiduciary magic, so I figure his inflated ego is fair game.

The Clinton administration’s supposed success is centered on two lies. One is that he produced a budget surplus, and the other is that he was not responsible for the housing crisis. Both of these lies are craftily linked together, and it is when you pull on one of them that the other comes tumbling down.

To understand how this works, we need to go back to Nixon and his move to take the United States off the gold standard.

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  • JazzQuipster

    What a pant load, Teddy, even for you this is quite a pant load.

    First, it was a terrific speech, one of the best that I have ever seen.

    Second, LEGITIMATE fact checkers, Politifact and factcheck.org have found only minor faults with Clinton’s speech and unlike you, in the cases where they disagree they spell out their reasons why.

    You criticize Clinton for conducting Operations Infinite Reach and Desert Fox making the outrageous claim that it was a “obvious ploy” to divert attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

    But what you failed to tell your readers is that both of those operations were missile strikes aimed at taking out Osama bin Laden. I guess you don’t mention that because it flies in the face of another favorite right-wing narrative that Clinton let bin Laden get away.

    But that’s just indicative of how deep right wing bullshit runs, one lie gets tripped up by another lie.

    And that brings us back to Romney/Ryan. Those two have been caught in so many lies that they don’t even try anymore, they’re not going to let their campaign be dictated by fact checkers. Good luck with that strategy.