Amen!

Not to nitpick, but the story implies that the bombing of Iraq was aimed at Osama bin Laden.

In fact, the action taken against bin Laden was the cruise missile attack in Afghanistan that Clinton mentioned in the Faux News interview. That attack occurred on August 28, 1998.

The bombing of Iraq was in response to the treatment of UNSCOM weapons inspectors by Saddam Hussein. That took place four months later, on December 16, 1998.

Carry on ...

Very clever.

Boy, the President with low as hell approval ratings, Republicans and ex-military blasting Rumsfeld, Good ole' Slick Willie ripping the GOP a new one, then stuff like this...

What I wouldn't give to be @the next Republican National Convention with everybody in there running around in a panic going, "OMG!!!11! SINKING SHIP!"

That would be better than TV.

-TM

skeptik said:
Not to nitpick, but the story implies that the bombing of Iraq was aimed at Osama bin Laden.


exactly.

I miss the point of your article on this...not doing shit for bin laden and bombing iraq have zero to do with each other.

Clinton simply did nothing major to go after Bin Laden...he may have done a little attack here and there but there was no real venture to capture him. I honestly see Clinton's outburst as a way of dodging the real truth that he did nothing. He doesn't need congress to approve a police action...only to declare war. he sent nobody after bin laden and he had no real answer in the interview.

and fucking witchunt? you lie on the stand, that's perjury...plain and simple. he should have been removed from office but the bullshit fact that you have to have 2/3 or whatever to do so kept him in. if anyone else did that in a federal court, bye bye, watch out for the cornhole. it had nothing to do with his sex life but the fact he blantanty lied.

Actually, you may want to do a little more studying of recent history before you go off on that rant.

As Clinton stated in the interview, truthfully, the cruise missile attack was the closest anyone has gotten to actually killing bin Laden. If he had, there would have been absolutely no reason to send anybody else after him. If a larger military attack had been tried, which would have had no greater chance of success, it would have done little more than inflate bin Laden's stature in the world.

Kind of like today, hmmm ...

Don't you just hate 'bullshit facts" like, oh I don't know, THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES???

Man! If it weren't for that one little technicality you could have gotten rid of Clinton and installed Newt as President right? It would have been Republican heaven, manna would have fallen from the skies, and we would have gotten free lollypops with our tax refunds huh? Oh wait! Nope...he's not next in the line of succession...hmmm...would it have been. Oh yeah! GORE!!

The majority of a Republican controlled Senate doesn't agree with that assessment. The two counts against Clinton were defeated 45-55 and 50-50. He would have remained in office even if the Republicans needed only a simple majority.

While you are correct that Clinton's bombing campaign in Iraq had little to do with Bin Laden, Clinton attempted several other actions aimed at Bin Laden specifically or terrorists in general.

There is more to perjury than simply lying under oath. The lie must be relating to a matter which tends to prove or disprove a material element of the case at hand. Whether or not Clinton had consentual sex with Monica has no bearing on whether or not he sexually harrassed Paula Jones. That is why the republican senate aquitted him of the perjury charges.

Yes, he lied under oath and that is a shameful terrible act. But he did not commit perjury.

There's nothing shameful about lying, under oath or otherwise, to protect one's privacy from shameful questions that you admit yourself had no bearing on the case at hand. Furthermore, the Paula Jones case is exactly the kind of bullshit lawsuit against which Republicans have been crusading for decades. Or years, anyway.

Interesting tidbit about the definition of perjury, by the way. Thank you.

clinton's bombing of sudan was aimed at getting bin-laden, not any bombing of iraq. beside the GOP charges of "wagging the dog" [surely NEXIS and even google can come up with quotes here too], chomsky also went on a rampage because they bombed an aspirin factory instead. yes, he missed but noam will be noam.

THIS has been my problem for years now. Ok, he failed to tell the exact truth. He didn't "lie", about getting a waistband smacker from ML, but who gives a shit about that. WHY was he being asked that in the first place? How did they call a grand jury in front of whom he would have been able to perjure himself in the first place? What was the basis of that subpeona? How does cheating on your wife warrant a special investigation and grand jury hearings?
I DON"T GET IT!
I'VE NEVER GOTTEN IT!
IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE PEOPLE!

Will someone for the LOVE OF GOD please explain this to me, like I'm a six year old. Seriously, channel Stephen Hawking (that guy can explain anything)

This is the sort of thing that usually gets me warnings from the moderator because I flip out over the complete inanity of someone trying to attack liberals simply for trying to reason their way through this raging granfalloon of a world.

theCreeps, I think your comments are purile, reactionary, and I think you lack genuine appreciation for our world and the lovely young ladies who inhabit this site. I don't appreciate your comments.

Does anyone get the fact that Osama Bin Laden is a coward, a tool, and just an all around worthless dumbass, who can't even tie his shoelaces let alone fight, but we make him out to be the most frightening villan in the world, and give him credence in manipulating young, impoverished Arabs by doing so.

He isn't worth the time. He isn't Hitler. He isn't fucking Lex Luthor.

He wasn't on any of the planes. He's never built a bomb. He hides in caves, spends his families money(which we supply to the tune of $2.63/gallon), and makes bad home movies. His only power is the fear which we give him.

And Bill Clinton came a hairs breath away from shoving 62 guided missles up his ass, and that would have accomplished: shoving 62 guided missles up Bin Laden's ass so that the next day some cleric or some other militant could start being the world's greatest living terrorist mastermind. He's one guy, and he's hiding in a cave.

But you want to know what Clinton did to really get Bin Laden, what he did in the FIRST goddamn year he was in office. It was called the Oslo Accords.

It was peace. It was creating stability in the middle east, and providing enough tranquility that nations like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, and god willing Palestine, could invest in their countries, in infrastructure, and in schools, to maintain their economies after oil went belly up (which it will, and Clinton knew this because he had Gore, one of the most active VPs of all time), to raise their people out of poverty and ignorance whch are the breeding grounds of hatred, extreme-ism, and terrorism!

Bill Clinton came closer to killing Bin Laden than anyone else ever has, but more importantly he came closer to erasing Bin Laden from history than anyone else ever has. George Bush Jr. has only SECURED Bin Laden's place in history.

Wow.

It really is just a little bit of history-repeating.

1) The executive can't really do all that much without any cooperation whatsoever from the legislature. That whole "separation of powers" thing, and the "checks and balances" thing? That keeps one single branch of the federal government from running roughshod over the will of another branch--particularly the legislative branch. If Congress is against you and determined to check your power at every opportunity, it tends to hamper your effectiveness just a bit. No, Congress doesn't need to authorize every single military action explicitly, but there are a lot of ways for Congress to hinder such action if they want to.

2) Yes, he perjured himself. That's a crime. He was disbarred as an attorney for that, by the by--he faced consequences, even if he didn't get kicked out of office. But the plain fact is that no one had any reason for bringing any of the Monica shit up in the first place except for a rabid desire to take him down at whatever cost. And that desire had been thriving in the far right since well before he even took office. He fucked up by lying about it--but they wasted our time and money by bringing it up in the first place. Last I checked, it wasn't a crime to get a blowjob, or even to cheat on your wife. And, last I checked, getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinski didn't have shit to do with the seriously questionable sexual harassment claims of Paula Jones (a woman Monica--who never claimed that her interaction with Clinton was anything but consensual--had no connection with whatsoever, and a woman who was receiving some heavy, heavy coaching throughout that whole trial--by the likes of Ann Coulter, no less--did you know she was one of the attorneys on that case?), which is the context in which that got brought up in the first place.

3) It really doesn't matter what the average person would face after perjuring him/herself in court (federal or otherwise), because the average person doesn't have nearly the responsibility that the president does, which is why standards for reasons to kick a president out of office in the middle of his term are strict. Personally, I think there are some damn good reasons, with an eye to national stability and the prevention of just the exact kind of bullshit that people were trying to pull with that whole mess (i.e., circumventing the voters' will by trying to get a validly elected president taken out of office however possible for purely political reasons), why a supermajority is needed to kick our executive out of office. Do you know what a disaster things would be if booting the president wasn't a hard thing to do? It would do all kinds of damage to the country that would last long after that particular president would have been out of office anyway. There's a reason why things like that were put into the Constitution, you know, other than "bullshit."