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Republicans warn against 2016 strategy that goes overboard...(SecyState&Bengazi:fair game)
Fox News.com ^ | February 16, 2014 | Fox News

Posted on 02/16/2014 3:59:23 PM PST by INVAR

Former Bush administration adviser Karl Rove on Sunday cautioned Republicans against a 2016 presidential election strategy that focuses too much on the political history of potential Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...


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KEYWORDS: 2016; elections; hillaryclinton; karlrove
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To: INVAR

I think it’s good for people to be reminded of the Clinton antics.


21 posted on 02/16/2014 4:09:43 PM PST by ryan71 (The Partisans)
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To: INVAR

NUTS!


22 posted on 02/16/2014 4:10:13 PM PST by getarope (Jesus is coming soon, and boy is he PISSED!)
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To: scbison

Rove is a political prostitute who takes his fee from the republican high spenders. Among his customers are the Bush family, all of them including the neo-USA Mexicans.


23 posted on 02/16/2014 4:10:39 PM PST by noinfringers2 ( /*)
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To: INVAR

I think it’s good for people to be reminded of the Clinton antics.


24 posted on 02/16/2014 4:10:42 PM PST by ryan71 (The Partisans)
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To: INVAR
For those who may have forgotten what kind of a President Bill Clinton was:

1) Clinton’s own words show his often expressed innate hostility to, and utter contempt for, the core principles of the American founding:

``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

``The purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people’’ –- Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993

``We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans…that we forget about reality.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, ``NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful’’’ by Debbie Howlett

“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly… that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare… However, now there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.” – Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995

2) Clinton inevitably pursued his own political advantage at the expense of American interests and national security. Here is just one of many possible examples:

It is well documented that Clinton and the Democrats took illegal campaign money from groups and individuals tied directly to the Chinese People’s Republican Army. It is therefore not surprising that In January 1998 Clinton went against the advice of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon experts by lifting long-standing restrictions against the export of American satellites to China for launch on Chinese rockets. Not only did he move control over such decisions from the more security-focused State Department to the Commerce Department, but he intervened in a Justice Department investigation of Loral Space & Communications, retroactively enabling Loral to sell critical missile technology to the Chinese. Interestingly enough, Clinton’s decision was made at the request of Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, whose earlier $1.3 million campaign donation made him the single biggest contributor to the Democratic election effort.

The result, as stated eloquently by syndicated columnist Linda Bowles, was that “the Democrats got money from satellite companies and from Chinese communists; China got supercomputors, advanced production equipment and missile technology; Loral got its satellites launched at bargain basement prices . . . and the transfer of sensitive missile technology gave China [for the first time] the capability of depositing bombs on American cities.” Incidentally, Loral ultimately failed to benefit from this permanent injury to America’s security interests: in July 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and in order to raise cash was forced to sell its most profitable business – a fleet of communications satellites orbiting over North America.

3) On two occasions, Clinton used military action for the specific purpose of distracting the American public from the fallout of the Lewinsky affair:

• On August 20, three days after Clinton finally admitted publicly to the Lewinsky affair, the news media was poised to focus on that day’s grand jury testimony by Monica Lewinsky. That same morning, Clinton personally went on national television to gravely announce his bombing of a Sudanese “chemical weapons factory,” and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It was the first time most Americans ever heard the name of Osama bin Laden. The factory bombing in Sudan killed an innocent night watchman, but accomplished little else. It later was proven that the plant was making badly needed pharmaceuticals for people in that poverty-stricken part of the world, but no chemical weapons.

Several months later, the U.S. Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, stated: "...the evidence indicates that the facility had no role whatsoever in chemical weapons development." Kroll Associates, one of the world's most reputable investigative firms, also confirmed that there was no link in any way between the plant and any terrorist organization. As for the Afghanistan bombing, it failed to do any damage at all to bin Laden or his organization. Clinton’s action was accurately characterized by George W. Bush when he said right after 9-11: "When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.

Clinton’s pointless and murderous military actions did not make Americans safer that day, although they did destroy an innocent life, and for all the good they did certainly could have been delayed in any case. But they did succeed in diverting media attention from Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony for a 24-hour news cycle, which was the main point. So I guess, they weren’t a total loss.

•On December 16, 1998, on the eve of the scheduled House vote on his impeachment, Bill Clinton launched a surprise bombing attack on Baghdad. As justification for this exploit, he cited the urgent threat that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction posed to America, and the need for immediate action. Almost immediately, the House Democrats held a caucus and emerged calling for a delay in the impeachment proceedings. House minority leader Dick Gephardt made a statement: "We obviously should pass a resolution by saying that we stand behind the troops. I would hope that we do not take up impeachment until the hostilities have completely ended."

Conveniently, a delay so near the end of the House term would have caused the vote to be taken up in the next session – when the newly elected House membership would be seated with more Democratic representation, thereby improving Clinton’s chances of dodging impeachment.

The Republicans did, in fact, agree to delay the hearings, but only for a day or two. Amazingly, Clinton ended the bombing raid after only 70 hours -- once it became clear that in spite of the brief delay, the vote would still be held in the current session.

Once the bombing stopped, Clinton touted the effectiveness and importance of the mission. As reported by ABC News : “We have inflicted significant damage on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, on the command structures that direct and protect that capability, and on his military and security infrastructure,” he said. Defense secretary William Cohen echoed the point: “We estimate that Saddam's missile program has been set back by at least a year.”

Whether or not one buys Clinton’s assessment of that mission, it is difficult to believe that its timing was so critical that it required commencement virtually at the moment the House was scheduled to vote on the impeachment. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that Clinton cynically deployed US military assets and placed military personnel in harm’s way for purely political reasons.

4) Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior was a threat to American national security:

Clinton and his supporters have been very effective in persuading large numbers of Americans that the Lewinsky scandal was “only about sex.” But I see a bigger issue here, because Clinton is on record as saying that he would have done anything to keep knowledge of the Lewinsky affair from becoming public.

To me, that statement raises a very serious question: What if, instead of sending her recorded Lewinsky conversations to Ken Starr, Linda Tripp had instead secretly offered them for sale, say, to the Chinese government? Or to the Russians? Or even to agents of Saddam?

What kind of blackmail leverage would those tapes have provided to a foreign government in dealing with America on sensitive trade, security or military issues? One of the few things Clinton ever said that I believe is that he would have done anything to keep the Lewinsky affair secret. Given his demonstrated track record of selling out American interests for personal or political gain (and there are more examples that I could have cited here), how far would he have gone in compromising America’s real interests in order to protect his own neck when threatened with blackmail?

Pretty far, I believe. Equally distressing is the prospect Clinton might, in fact, have succumbed to foreign black mail on other occasions in order to hide different sexual episodes that ultimately did not become public. There is no way to know, of course, but I prefer presidents for whom such a scenario is not a plausible possibility.

And don’t even get me started on the war crime in Kosovo.

WAR IN KOSOVO

During Bill Clinton’s 1999 NATO-led war in Kosovo – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)

We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.

Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.

But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanian Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a “humanitarian war.” In March 1999 – the same month that the bombing started – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.

Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations had been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague were barely been able to document a questionable figure of perhaps 5,000 “bodies and body parts.” During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanian Muslims. But none were ever found.

BILL CLINTON ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

During the election cycle of 1992, George H.W. Bush lost his job after Bill Clinton hammered him relentlessly for having caused the “worst economy of the last 50 years.”

In fact, as CNN’s Brooke Jackson has reported: “Three days before Christmas 1992, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally issued its official proclamation that the recession had ended 21 months earlier. What became the longest boom in U.S. history actually began nearly two years before Clinton took office.” See (See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/31/jackson.recession.primer.otsc/).

By the same token, Clinton is generally perceived as having a stellar economic record during his own presidency, in spite of the fact that the economy was already starting to decline during the last year of his term after the stock market crashed in March 2000.

According to a report by MSNBC: “The longest economic expansion in U.S. history faltered so much in the summer of 2000 that business output actually contracted for one quarter, the government said Wednesday in releasing a comprehensive revision of the gross domestic product. Based on new data, the Commerce Department said that the GDP — the country’s total output of goods and services — shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000.” See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3676690/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/gdp-figures-revised-downward/.

25 posted on 02/16/2014 4:10:58 PM PST by Maceman
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To: INVAR

The MSM and the internet have been saturated with pro homosexual propaganda. This is an attempt to desensitize the American people on this issue. The real test will be Hilary Clinton. There is a very good chance that her homosexuality will come out during the 2016 campaign. Then the country will answer her question when she screeched “What does it matter?’ Somehow despite the preparatory barrage, it will turn out to matter. In that case be prepared to see our jet lagged, global trotting Secretary of State, John Kerry, become the Democratic nominee in 2016. He still desperately wants to be President.


26 posted on 02/16/2014 4:12:46 PM PST by allendale
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To: ExCTCitizen

I am with you with Walker. I like him.


27 posted on 02/16/2014 4:15:22 PM PST by DallasSun
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To: BenLurkin
We’ll just tell the truth about her.

There is plenty of tapes on Hillary. Her tapes will do that perfectly. We don't have to attack her, just let her attack herself.

Of course, then she will go into her victim mode. Which is her strong suit. She'll cry about how hard she's worked and how much she cares, and how "tawd" she is.

Then we go into her actual record, which there isn't any. She has never accomplished anything of value to anyone except to herself. She has been on the public dole for forty years and has yet to accomplish anything other than political food fights.

28 posted on 02/16/2014 4:15:40 PM PST by oldbrowser (Obamacare is Obama's Great Leap Forward)
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To: INVAR
I saw a bit of O’Reilly’s interview with Huckabee the other night. I generally avoid such programs but the issue had to do with how Huckabee would handle a debate against Princess Hillary. Whenever Huckabee mentioned an issue, O’Reilly, perhaps correctly, said “that would be interpreted by some viewers and the media as bullying...” because of her gender which I guess is female victimization.
29 posted on 02/16/2014 4:15:47 PM PST by ConservativeStatement ("World Peace 1.20.09.")
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To: INVAR

Gee, that worked SO WELL last election, and one the before it.

Got a better idea. Pull out the knives and slice her to bits.


30 posted on 02/16/2014 4:16:28 PM PST by Little Ray (How did I end up in this hand-basket, and why is it getting so hot?)
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To: INVAR

I now we’re supposed to hate Rove but Rove destroyed that guy on FNS this morning.


31 posted on 02/16/2014 4:18:15 PM PST by DungeonMaster
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To: INVAR

32 posted on 02/16/2014 4:18:32 PM PST by Manic_Episode (GOP = The Whig Party)
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To: INVAR

What else does the GOP have to run on?


33 posted on 02/16/2014 4:19:16 PM PST by ex-snook (God is Love)
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To: INVAR

Another member of the GOP enemy within speaks!

Step aside, you fat, bald little weasel, and let a real man like Ted Cruz show you how to lead.


34 posted on 02/16/2014 4:20:23 PM PST by CatherineofAragon ((Support Christian white males----the architects of the jewel known as Western Civilization.))
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To: INVAR
Not gonna happen this time.

These sock puppets aren't gonna get by with this again, no more McCains, Romney's slamming their conservative GOP opponents but not laying a velvet glove on whomever runs on the liberals!

TEA party types don't need to show their hands entirely as the media will go after them like an anti-christ demon, a danger to the known world and those undecideds will be "educated" to believe America just can't stand Candidate X!

35 posted on 02/16/2014 4:21:22 PM PST by zerosix (Native Sunflower)
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To: INVAR

We didn’t attack the Kenyan and look where that got us. You can’t fix stupid.


36 posted on 02/16/2014 4:22:36 PM PST by FlingWingFlyer (As government expands, liberty contracts. - President Ronald W. Reagan)
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To: INVAR

The Republican running against Hillary should look straight into the TV camera and ask the American public: “Would you trust your life or your country to someone who blatantly abandoned American citizens in Benghazi while she had the chance to save them? Because if you do, you can kiss your asses and your country goodbye?

But I doubt that the timid Republican would dare to come out swinging — he/she would rather be remembered as a loser who remained “correct and fair” throughout the debates while his/her RAT opponent kicks ass.


37 posted on 02/16/2014 4:23:03 PM PST by 353FMG
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To: INVAR

Screw you Rove.


38 posted on 02/16/2014 4:23:12 PM PST by Vision (Tune out, drop back)
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To: sauropod

.


39 posted on 02/16/2014 4:24:49 PM PST by sauropod (Fat Bottomed Girl: "What difference, at this point, does it make?")
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To: INVAR
Anyone yet understand that Rove and the GOP-e are actually working FOR the Democrats?

That became clear during McCain's run, and was reaffirmed during Romney's. I don't expect the GOP to switch sides away from the DNC any time soon.

40 posted on 02/16/2014 4:25:52 PM PST by Cementjungle
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