by Alan Colmes
A friend of the environment, Clinton promoted the Roadless Area Conservation Protection Rule that protected 58.5 million American acres from roadbuilding and commercial logging. Yellowstone National Park, the California redwoods, and the Florida Everglades were just some of the areas preserved for posterity, no thanks to the Republicans who didn't support their protection. During Clinton's presidency, new clean air standards were set for soot and smog, and diesel engine emissions and emissions for cars, trucks, and SUVs were more strictly regulated; and the Endangered Species Act was expanded to protect 170 plants and animals living in threatened environments.
If the Republicans had their way, they would have sold off the national parks to private interests. Would we really have wanted one of our great national treasures to be known as "The Trump Canyon"? When the Republicans got mad at Clinton and shut down the federal government in 1995 and 1996, and access to national parks was denied, the public came to understand the value of these public monuments. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said, "President Clinton will go down in history as one of the great defenders of the environment, not only for everything the administration accomplished, but for all the things they stopped Congress from doing." The Wilderness Society declared Clinton "one of the top conservation presidents of all time."
It wasn't long before the Bush 43 administration tried to undo Clinton's environmental accomplishments by rescinding new rules on arsenic in drinking water and loosening restrictions on mining. In fact, within ninety minutes of taking office on January 20, 2001, Bush 43 had his chief of staff, Andy Card, put out a memo to department heads to stop publishing new or pending regulations in the Federal Register. Based on what regulations were pending, it seemed clear that Bush 43 was trying to halt environmental initiatives that would have decreased water pollution generated by factory farms, created national monuments, and reduced harmful diesel emissions. Bush 43 seemed to think first about WWCD—What Would Clinton Do— and then he'd do the opposite. Clinton likes roast beef? I'm having the turkey. Clinton used the elevator? I'm taking the stairs. Clinton wore a yellow tie? I'm wearing red. Hey, pal, I'm seeing red here.
Clinton's Successful Affairs—Foreign, That Is
George Mitchell says he feels more frightened sitting between Sean and me than he does when he's in tense negotiating sessions. But the former Senate majority leader from Maine chaired talks that resulted in the Good Friday Accords, bringing peace to Northern Ireland on April 10, 1998, for the first time in twenty-nine years. On September 26, 1995, the Clinton administration achieved another huge foreign policy victory when the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia (including the Bosnian Serbs) agreed in principle to a pact that was codified in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21 and signed in Paris in December 14, 1995. When the Serbs began "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians in 1999, Clinton, with the cooperation of NATO, initiated a bombing campaign, and the despot responsible, Slobodan Milosevic, wound up in a world court. And unlike our policy toward Iraq, there was no plan for American takeover of a foreign government and possession of its natural resources.
In Haiti, Clinton was able to peacefully achieve the removal of General Raoul Cedras, who had overthrown a democratically elected president. As the president prepared to send troops in if necessary, Colin Powell and Jimmy Carter and Georgia senator Sam Nunn convinced Cedras to step aside so Jean-Bertrand Aristide could resume his presidency. Great leadership was also shown in brokering a relationship between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, which resulted in the Wye Agreements that called for a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip. A good relationship with Boris Yeltsin and an agreement to help the former Soviet Union financially helped secure Russia's nuclear arsenal and made it possible for Russia to agree to help us dismantle their nuclear weapons.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, which opponents predicted would steal jobs from Americans, resulted in one-and-a-half times more gains than losses, according to the Library of Congress. But NAFTAs biggest success was its impact on the politics and the economy of Mexico. It helped to stabilize our neighbors to the south without the "giant sucking sound" of jobs leaving America, as Ross Perot predicted. Taking a political risk by going against the protectionist grain of his own party, Bill Clinton's NAFTA vision has proven to be correct over time. And when the Senate opposed bailing out Mexico by 81-15, Clinton did it by executive order. His prescience proved correct, as Mexico repaid the loan three years ahead of schedule.
A policy of free trade, international alliances for peacekeeping, and protection of basic human and civil rights was the basis for Clinton's "Doctrine of Enlargement," which resulted in the expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The Clinton era provided not only enhanced prosperity but also enhanced global peace, which, in turn, fed that prosperity.
Of course, I did not always agree with Bill Clinton. Just as I was against the war in Iraq, I opposed sending forces into Kosovo. But at least my opposition has been consistent. Republicans, who have a tendency to knock the patriotism of anyone who questions a Republican president's decision to go to war, were less consistent when the commander in chief was Bill Clinton. When Clinton responded to the threat of terrorism by ordering retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan, Senator Dan Coates offered this incisive war analysis: "I just hope and pray the decision that was made was made on the basis of sound judgment and made for the right reasons, and not made because it was necessary to save the president's job." And when Clinton responded to the threat of terrorism by ordering retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania felt the need to state, "There's an obvious issue that will be raised internationally as to whether there is any diversionary motivation." And then senator John Ashcroft, who was toying with running for president against Al Gore, greeted military action by saying, "... there is a cloud over this presidency." Dana Rohrabacher, the California congressional firebrand, actually blamed Clinton for terrorism in Afghanistan: "Once the fire from the retaliatory strike dies down, the American people are going to find out that it is the Clinton administration's wrongheaded policies that resulted in the creation of this terrorist haven in Afghanistan in the first place." That's a new one, especially since it was Ronald Reagan who signed National Security Decision Directive 166 in March 1985 that called for us to arm and finance the Mujahedin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. And the Mujahedin formed the core of what later became the Taliban.
Will His Epitaph Read "Here'Lies' Bill Clinton"?
A complete record of Clinton's accomplishments will be available at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock; but not content to allow him to construct a Clinton library unimpeded, a few of his nonadmirers announced plans for a "Counter Clinton Liebrary" to open in Little Rock, a "short walk" from the real thing, "to set the record straight." John "Boot" LeBoutiller who, in spite of our political differences, has been a friend of mine since his days as the youngest congressman in the House in 1980, came on Hannity & Colmes to talk about it:
COLMES: . . . next year, just six months before the official opening of the Clinton library in Little Rock, Arkansas, another library will open in the same city. The founders of the Counter Clinton library said it'll feature sixteen rooms of scandals that the official library surely won't touch, including the National Insecurity Hall, the Department of Domestic Affairs, and the Hall of Shame.
LEBOUTILLIER: . . . it's the Hillary Hall of Shame is what it's called.
COLMES: All right, I want to get to that, too. But first, you said your favorite room in one of the stories I read is the exit room... . You talk about how the Clintons trashed the White House.
LEBOUTILLIER: Correct.
COLMES: That's not a part—some of the misconceptions here. Let me show you what the GAO report said about this. They said "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy."
LEBOUTILLIER: R
ight. Now that is not the actual report that the permanent staff of the White House has written. . . . And President Bush . . .
COLMES: . . . that's what the GAO said, nonpartisan.
LEBOUTILLIER: No, but we have a report, and it's posted on our site ... on the front page, written by the permanent White House staff. . . . It's a 78-page report describing what the Clintons did to the building. And . . .
COLMES: It was a biased report.
And, horror of horrors, we found out Clinton's library is "taxpayer funded." Somehow, the same financial model for the Reagan library failed to attract such startled responses from the peanut gallery.
Boot says the reason the "exit" room is his favorite is because it signifies the end of the Clinton presidency. It apparently hasn't signified the end of the anti-Clinton gravy train. The "Exit Room" is to be, according to the counterclintonlibrary.com press release "as the Clintons left it—trashed, damaged and defiled." As I pointed out to Boot, that is inaccurate. The General Accounting Office reported a very different story. As I said on Hannity & Colmes, the GAO's May 18, 2001, report stated: "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." A later report by the GAO claimed that it couldn't verify the condition of the property because records weren't available. What? Could there have been a shredder in a Republican White House?
Conservatives salivate at the opportunity to remind you about how Clinton "loathed the military and all it stands for." Of course, that's not what Clinton said, but it's been repeated so many times that it's become common parlance. Here's what then student Clinton actually said in a letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes of the University of Arkansas ROTC: ". . . so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give ..."
In fact, many who had strong views about an undeclared war in Vietnam experienced evolutions in thinking during that time, as our government lied about body counts and the relative success of the war. Bush 43 hasn't been held nearly as accountable for his days of being "young and irresponsible," a time during which he allegedly not only inhaled, but also swallowed and who knows what else.
One of the stated goals of the "Counter Clinton Liebrary" is to warn people about the political ambitions of Hillary. How often do we hear, in shocking tones, that, oh my God, Hillary wants to be president! And she might even get elected! What are they worried about? Do they fear a democratic process in which voting citizens get to decide on government personnel? I'd be a little more upset about a dishonest electoral system that doesn't respect the popular vote.
Among the lies spread about Hillary Clinton, and promoted as part of the "liebrary," is "her Yale Law School defense of Black Panther murderers." This entry in the "Stop Hillary Now" part of the "liebrary" is based on an urban legend floating around the Internet that claims that Hillary defended Black Panthers accused of killing another Panther named Alex Rackely, and that she led a demonstration that shut down Yale in the process. The truth is, as usual, much tamer. Hillary worked as an intern in die law office of one of the attorneys defending the accused Panthers (who were nowhere near the scene of the crime), and she presided over a meeting of law students discussing the proper response to the gassing of student demonstrators. But nuances don't make good copy. And they don't fit the anti-Biliary agenda.
Please buy another copy of this book. I'm going to use the proceeds to open a tribute to Ronald Reagan. I'm calling it the "Contra Contra Liebrary." Or maybe I'll go down to Texas where all those executions take place and open the Bush 43 "Frybrary."
Low Names and High Dudgeon
I guess we shouldn't be surprised at the demeaning "liebrary" Clinton's detractors are promoting. It's consistent with their use of derogatory language to insult him. One of the most amusing aspects of the Clinton years was how his enemies referred to him. Until impeachment he was either "Bubba" or "Slick Willie," but during impeachment proceedings he became known as "William Jefferson Clinton," as if to ask how a man with such a haughty-sounding name could be on trial for such low behavior. But no matter how clearly or how loudly one proclaims the accomplishments of our forty-second president, the seething hatred toward him proves, as Mark Twain once said, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."
From:WallyT
Sent: Monday, July 03,2000 7:08 PM
To: colmes
Subject: Values
Mr. Colmes,
Clinton and his supporters like yourself, has for 7 long years done everything possible to undermind this republic.
Well,THANK GOD you have failed, and your reign of corruption is coming to a close.Am I still allowed to say THANK GOD on the computer???...
I served 6 years in the Army defending Liberal jackoffs like yourself, I sometime wonder if it was worth it. Months at a time in the jungles of Central America. Panama, El Salvador Nicaragua, do you know these places? I think the only way you would see places like this would be on the Discovery channel.
Wally T.
Smyrna, GA
Wally, first let me thank you for serving our country, even if you did have to defend "jackoffs" like me. And let me quote my favorite president: I feel your pain. And so did Bill Clinton, even if you can't return the favor. He had a quality you've failed to display here: empathy. At a campaign event in New York on March 26, 1992, Bob Rafsky, an activist from ACT-UP who was trying to draw attention to the AIDS epidemic by accusing Clinton of not addressing the issue when he was governor of Arkansas, continually jeered him. After a few interruptions, Clinton snapped back, "I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you're no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don't agree with me, go support somebody else for President but quit talking to me like that." The phrase "I feel your pain" may have become fodder for those who wished to mock Clinton, but it represented a candidate, and later a president, who could connect with Americans viscerally, whether addressing a large crowd or speaking one-on-one.
So What If Bill Clinton Is Black?
It was no accident that the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison referred to Clinton as "our first black president." During the Clinton era, minorities did especially well. Unemployment among blacks dropped from 14.1 percent to 7.8 percent between 1992 and 1999, and black teen unemployment went from 40.5 percent in January 1993 to 28.6 percent in August 1999. In that same period, Hispanic unemployment decreased from 11.3 percent to 6.5 percent. We can argue all we want about whether affirmative action is the right path; we can constantly debate whether having Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell in highly visible positions really advances the cause of African Americans. But the true test of government policy that promotes equality in America is reflected in these numbers from the Clinton era.
Bill Clinton's gift to African Americans extended beyond the economic policies that lifted so many out of poverty. Clinton was the first president to acknowledge some of our own sordid history concerning the treatment of minorities. We presume to own the high ground when it comes to humanitarianism, but we have conveniently forgotten episodes like the Tuskegee experiments. Our government used poor, black, illiterate sharecroppers from Alabama as though they were lab animals. And this isn't ancient history. The Tuskegee experiments began in 1932 and continued until they were exposed forty years later. Three hundred ninety-nine men in the late stages of syphilis were told they were being treated for "bad blood." In fact, they were being treated for nothing. It wasn't their live bodies the government wanted, but their dead ones, so their corpses could be used by the U.S. Public Health Service to see how syphilis affected them differently than it affected whites. Because husbands who believed they were being treated were deceived, wives were infected and children were born with congenital syphilis
during these experiments. When penicillin was invented in the 1940s, it was purposely denied to these men. And when asked about it, the Public Health Service claimed these people were participating voluntarily.
When President Clinton did the right thing and apologized for what the government did, his detractors accused him of pandering to the black community. Here's what President Clinton said: "The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist."
Predictably, some conservative pundits used this opportunity to tie Clinton's good-hearted and moral gesture to his sex life. Jonah Goldberg, who became a member of the punditocracy thanks to the meddling efforts of his mother, Lucianne, to help Linda Tripp get a book deal off her friendship with Monica Lewinsky, had this to say: "Many thought that the African apology safari was a limited engagement, a sideshow to distract people from the center ring during the Year of the President's Pants."
If Bill Clinton had found a cure for cancer, they would have called it a distraction from Republican attempts to impeach him.
Hate Him at Your Own Peril
Sometimes you know how successful you are by who your enemies are and by how intensely they hate you. By that measure, Clinton is our most successful president. Hating Clinton became a cottage industry for many Americans. Not only could Clinton feel your pain, but also, if you were his enemy, he'd toss that pain right back at you. This frustrated his opponents to no end. His enemies tried to destroy his career using every trick in the book, ultimately settling on a trumped-up sex charge. But rather than achieve his resignation, it was Republicans like Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston who wound up eating his dust. More Republicans resigned than Democrats during the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office.