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Rand Paul’s Bill Clinton-bashing is political. But he has a point (Paul's getting to them!)
washingtonpost.com ^ | 2/10/14 | Mary Curtis

Posted on 02/12/2014 9:58:13 AM PST by cotton1706

Rand Paul, the U.S. senator from Kentucky and an all-but-certain contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, is hitting Democratic Party claims to be the party for women with attacks on Bill Clinton’s infidelity with an intern in the White House.

Is it a political maneuver to tarnish top rival Hillary Clinton with guilt by association? Of course. Is Paul taking aim at a popular Democratic Party fundraiser, just as the former president is about to campaign for 2014 candidates, including Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Paul’s own state of Kentucky? You bet.

Does Paul’s charge contain some truth? Certainly. Though the sheen of former president Bill Clinton’s era of peace and prosperity obscures memories of his Oval Office indiscretions, and the globe-trotting statesman is more popular than ever, it’s impossible to dismiss Monica Lewinsky as old and not very relevant news. (Really, could you imagine Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama or either Bush thinking an affair with an intern was a good idea? It was indeed the lapse in judgment and character that critics always claimed.)

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


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Front Page News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: elections; randpaul
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I recognized instantly what Paul was doing, he was establishing a talking point to counter the "war on women" and put the liberals back on their heels.

And it's working! It seems only Paul and Cruz and Lee have brains enough (or will enough) to take on or stick a shiv in the democrats!

1 posted on 02/12/2014 9:58:13 AM PST by cotton1706
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To: cotton1706

A shiv or a shank? I’m delighted with either....


2 posted on 02/12/2014 10:02:11 AM PST by Phinneous
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To: cotton1706

turn about is far play...I am waiting for “Goober” Clinton to vapor lock in midstride. Just like Nelson Rockafeller did...


3 posted on 02/12/2014 10:03:39 AM PST by Rumplemeyer (The GOP should stand its ground - and fix Bayonets)
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To: cotton1706

He has a BIG point. What republican has not been demonized, while that corrupt SOB Clinton (both of them) strut around as heroes.

You cannot win elections in that climate, you cannot let your opponent be a pig and leave you with the smell of bacon. You have to call a pig a pig (both of them).


4 posted on 02/12/2014 10:04:56 AM PST by Williams (No Obama)
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To: Rumplemeyer

“I am waiting for “Goober” Clinton to vapor lock in midstride. Just like Nelson Rockafeller did...”

Yup, that’s how he’ll probably go, though that won’t be the official story.


5 posted on 02/12/2014 10:05:04 AM PST by cotton1706
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To: cotton1706
I recognized instantly what Paul was doing, he was establishing a talking point to counter the "war on women" and put the liberals back on their heels.

And predictably, Karl "Tokyo" Rove attacked the strategy and took a shot at Rand Paul in the process.

6 posted on 02/12/2014 10:05:08 AM PST by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: cotton1706

Rand Paul is among the top tier of the lessers of evil...but, as yet, there is no Dr Ron Paul on the horizon!

Semper xonservative-libertarian!
Dick.G: AMERICAN !
*****


7 posted on 02/12/2014 10:09:14 AM PST by gunnyg ("A Constitution changed from Freedom, can never be restored; Liberty, once lost, is lost forever...)
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To: cotton1706
hillary's already got the "what difference does it make" problem with her ineptness in protecting Benghazi. The phrase could also apply toward her attitude about Bill's infidelities.

Rand Paul's correct to keep these issues out there. hillary's attitude seems to be "what difference does it make" whenever she should be making tough decisions.

Meanwhile, I'd love it if both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz got out there in campaign mode, so the RINOs can't dismiss them one at a time. If constitutional conservatives can get past back-stabbing RINOs, TedCruz/RandPaul would have a much better than even chance of winning the election.

8 posted on 02/12/2014 10:11:02 AM PST by grania
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To: cotton1706

Interesting how it starts and stops with Lewinsky. At least that one was consensual. Let’s see if anyone is willing to take it to the next level.


9 posted on 02/12/2014 10:11:43 AM PST by cdcdawg (Be seeing you...)
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To: Rumplemeyer

““I am waiting for “Goober” Clinton to vapor lock in midstride. Just like Nelson Rockafeller did...”

More importantly, Hillary needs to have a stroke. It would be poetic justice for her to live out her life as a vegetable in a wheelchair. She has done so much damage to our country.


10 posted on 02/12/2014 10:12:03 AM PST by vette6387
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To: cotton1706

If Bill Clinton had not married Miss Rodum, there would be no Mrs. Bill Clinton who would go on to become “The most admired Woman in America.”

Hence, Paul’s “Attack Bill and not the Hill” strategy is politically smart. Messy, but smart.


11 posted on 02/12/2014 10:17:37 AM PST by Graewoulf (Democrats' Obamacare Socialist Health Insur. Tax violates U.S. Constitution AND Anti-Trust Law.)
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To: cotton1706
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/.

12 posted on 02/12/2014 10:28:12 AM PST by Maceman
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To: cotton1706

The klintoons helped us get there — BIG TIME — so let’s put HER in the Spite House. NOT!!

ARRIVING IN GOMORRAH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3tonnjMSI&list=UUFDlhK80EdO28R-iGTXiGaw&feature=c4-overview


13 posted on 02/12/2014 10:31:28 AM PST by Dick Bachert (Ignorance is NOT BLISS. It is the ROAD TO SERFDOM! We're on a ROAD TRIP!!)
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To: cotton1706

He does have a point. They are the ones waging this constant “war on women”. If they plan to run a woman, make the Clintons walk the walk.


14 posted on 02/12/2014 10:33:39 AM PST by jersey117
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To: cotton1706

Monica Lewinski was just a middle-of-the-road example of his behavior. His lifelong pattern of using his power to reward women who pleasured him, and destroy those who declined include many examples. Juanita Broadrick charges weren’t refuted after the (Lisa Meyers?) report...just ignored.


15 posted on 02/12/2014 10:54:18 AM PST by lepton ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)
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To: cotton1706

Yes, I’ve seen on various board, why are they pickin’ on Bubba?


16 posted on 02/12/2014 11:22:55 AM PST by Qwackertoo (Going into Politic Free Zone Momma Grizzly hibernation for a while after this week, maybe forever.)
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To: cotton1706
...former president Bill Clinton’s era of peace and prosperity

Otherwise known as Mohamed Atta's Flight School Days.

17 posted on 02/12/2014 11:40:13 PM PST by denydenydeny (Admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt one has for others.-Tocqueville)
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To: cotton1706

I think all candidates should thank Paul for destroying the War on Women meme.


18 posted on 02/13/2014 7:51:18 AM PST by Mamzelle
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To: Williams

Next rand paul needs to get lifesize posters made up of hillary in a burka and explain how she endorses the islamic war on wonen


19 posted on 02/13/2014 7:58:22 AM PST by BRL
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To: lepton

Yes, that was a shameful but true happening, and many in power, including Hillary, completely ignored it.


20 posted on 02/13/2014 3:03:32 PM PST by YepYep (Build the America you want at your address, and keep looking up.--Sarah Palin)
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