Posts Tagged ‘Bill Clinton’

For those not familiar, Hillary Clinton is probably best known for her characterization of a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” against her and Bill Clinton while he was deftly attempting to defend himself from the Lewinsky scandal. While that particular instance did turn out to be somewhat of a black eye on the history of the White House, Hillary’s characterization wasn’t far off the mark. By the time she said those words, the Clintons endured accusation on top of allegation that was trumpeted for the furthest reaches of the right-wing fringe and hit the echo chamber of a fledgling Fox News that was still winning the hearts and minds of stupid people all of the US. Vince Foster’s suicide, Troopergate, and all manner of things perpetrated by the imagination of Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Star polluted the American discourse. So while Clinton was, in fact, lying his ass off about Monica, the Wing-Nuts out there have a reputation of their own which has been earned through dedicated efforts of hysteria.

Now that another Democrat has defeated one of their own in a general election, no less after having the White House for the past eight years, it should be expected that the wing-nuts out there have pent up a great deal of hysteria that needs to come out. And oh lordy has it come out.

“This is the largest hoax perpetrated against the United States in 200 years,” Philip Berg declared in a news conference at the National Press Club. His colleagues delivered the further news that “Barack Obama is the most notorious criminal in the history of this planet” and that the president-elect’s claim to be a natural-born American has “the potential to propel our nation into a time of great peril,” a time of “widespread chaos, disturbances to public tranquillity.”

Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer and the author of another lawsuit alleging that Obama is not native-born, and therefore is not eligible to be president, sought to establish several facts. One: “He knows he was adopted in Indonesia.” Two: “He was born in Kenya.” Three: “His real name would be Barry Soetoro.” Four: “If he didn’t go through immigration, believe it or not Barack Obama would be an illegal alien today.” And five: “If and when the right court handles this matter, Barack Obama” and everybody around him “should really be tried criminally and many of them should go to jail.”

Uh, and what about that birth certificate showing he was born in Honolulu, a fact confirmed by the Hawaii Health Department and validated by independent groups?

“That document is a forgery, it’s a fraud, just like Barack Obama is,” Berg bellowed. “His birth certificate will indicate he was born in Kenya.”

Did you get that? The man elected by a clear majority of the people of the United States — a man so thoroughly vetted by a Democratic Primary that never seemed to end and then further worked over by a well-financed Republican political machine — is not, according to these guys, a citizen. All evidence to the contrary is fabricated. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

Back here on planet Earth, the Obama birth conspiracy is not quite as dramatic as Schulz and Berg view it. FactCheck.org, for example, examined the original birth certificate and found that “it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship” and that “Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.”

Another such group, PolitiFact.com, concluded that “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.”

Then there’s the birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961. “Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday,” FactCheck.org judged. “We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat.”

Indeed. Though I would think that none of these men are qualified to judge what would in fact be high-quality anything. But then comes my favorite part of the story.

To further make the case about Obama’s Americanness, they then called up Orly Taitz, a product of the former Soviet Union, to deliver the message in thickly accented English that the American news media are “aiding and abetting Mr. Obama in defrauding 300 million American citizens.”

So the media should report that Obama is a citizen of Britain, Indonesia and the United States — a triple national? “Quadruple!” Taitz called out.

ORLY? [Editor's note: To the unbaptised, the "ORLY Owl" has been an internet meme for a while now. (Followed quickly by many imitators and even answers.) The fact that these nutters produced a guy whose *name* is Orly is to no end of hilarity to me.]

Barack Obama and Democrats in general are getting a number lies told about them as of late. Here’s a quick post to help alleviate any confusion one may be getting from the recent uber-campaigning that’s going on.

Barack Obama: is a terrorist / is associated with terrorists / throw puppies over cliffs and laughs

If you or anyone else around you is thinking that Obama is a terrorist, it’s more than likely stemmed from this overblown association that Barack had with William Ayers. Ayers was, at one point in his youth, a member of a domestic terrorist operation that planned bombings of several governmental institutions. He turned himself in to the authorities in 1980 but was never convicted of a crime. Since that time he has reconstructed his life and become a highly respected professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Barack met him in 1995 as the two served on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Ayers hosted the first political event of Barack’s career as a statesman. So to say that this association somehow makes Obama a terrorist is a total fallacy.

Oh, and if you heard that puppy thing about Obama, that wasn’t him — it was American soldiers who were so obviously jaded to violence and death that they filmed the event.

Blame Barack Obama / Liberals in Congress / Bill Clinton for our financial crisis!

Okay, this one contains such tortured logic that it must be from Gitmo. But it also requires a bit of explanation as this situation is a bit complicated. To keep it simple, ask yourself what party, historically, has preached “free market principles” and “government out of your lives” and “deregulation”. If your answer is anything but the Republican Party, hit yourself in the temple with a ball-pin hammer. Hard. Repeat if necessary until you get the correct answer. Republicans have been crying foul over any type of government regulation until it is simply no longer politically tenable for them to do so. Keep in mind that the House Majority Leader from 2003-2005 was a man named Tom DeLay, who was also nicknamed the name Tom “DeReg”. That ought to give you a clue.

But as I said this situation we’re in is messy. Otherwise we wouldn’t be so fucked right now. To those that haven’t been keying into the details of the mess, I thought the piece on 60 Minutes last weekend summed it up very nicely, without having to resort to the usual “we need to talk to you like you’re an idiot” style employed by most of the cable news outlets.

The argument, as I see it, is about what exactly should be blamed: Sub-Prime mortgages or Credit Default Swaps. The former was a product of Democrats wanting to rid the industry of a practice known as “redlining”, the latter is a product of Republicans — more specifically John McCain’s economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm. Oddly enough, since Gramm stated that America was a “Nation of whiners” who was only experiencing a “mental recession”, Gramm has not been seen in public.

But those who wish to pin this particular debacle, much like every debacle we’ve faced since 1992, on Bill Clinton, I wish to direct you to the co-author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the co-sponsor of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Phil Gramm. You see the Republicans want to cry “Bill Clinton signed it! He brought this foul curse upon our nation!!!” But that’s not necessarily the case, by which I mean it’s tantamount to a lie. While it is true that Clinton signed it on December 21, 2000, it was a bill that never saw the debate floor of either house of Congress that was attached to the omnibus spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Education and Health & Human Services for the fiscal year already in progress. Translation: Billy-boy couldn’t have vetoed this even if he had the political capital to do so.

But in case you missed it, I, along with a few economists who actually know a great deal about economics, am placing blame on Credit Default Swaps. When you’re selling insurance, for which you need not to have cash to actually back up for, and call it a swap because if you call it insurance you have oversight, you should at least be put in jail for raping the English language. Bare minimum. When you turn this activity in a $62 trillion industry and when it comes crashing down it takes the rest of the stock market with it, you should be anally raped with a chainsaw. It’s that simple. Thanks Phil Gramm.

I’ll get to more later…this is becoming a lot longer than I had hoped.