The story du jour (pardon my French, I took Spanish) among the chattering classes of the Con movement is that that dastardly Bill Clinton is violating presidential protocol in criticizing dear leader because no Republican, lest alone Dear Leader’s parental unit, would do such a thing.
Sorry. Try again.
* In a March 8, 1994, speech in Indian Wells, California, Bush repeated his criticism of Clinton’s actions toward Haiti. According to a Riverside Press Enterprise article published the next day, Bush claimed “he did not want to be a carping critic, but said President Clinton must be more consistent in carrying out foreign policy. Bush criticized the president in particular for sending a shipload of troops to Haiti last year and then ordering them home when ‘thugs’ threatened them from the shore.”
* On April 8, 1994, Bush gave a lecture at Carl Albert State College in Poteau, Oklahoma, during which he criticized Clinton’s proposed health care reform legislation. “This may sound partisan,” he told the audience, “but I don’t believe it will pass and I don’t believe it should pass.” [Associated Press, 4/8/94]
* During a July 26, 1996, news conference with Bob Dole, then the Republican nominee for president, Bush “criticized Clinton for boasting of current economic stability,” according to a Kansas City Star article published the following day. Bush argued that “he handed Clinton an economy that grew at about 5 percent in 1993.” “That was not recession,” he told reporters.
* While campaigning with Dole days before the 1996 presidential election, Bush suggested that Clinton had compromised the “integrity of the White House. “What matters to me now is the integrity of the White House,” he said. “I believe in duty, honor, country,” he continued. “I believe in service. I believe in keeping the White House above partisan politics, away from these puny, terrible disputes we’re seeing.” [Chicago Tribune, 11/1/96]
As is always true with the Cons, facts hurt brain.
Why does La Shawn Barber hate America’s comments? (Comments not allowed on that post, that girl’s a hater!)
Oliver;
Please don’t confuse the issue with facts.
cypher,
Because the American Left hates her.
She has blogged numerous times about the hours she spends deleting comments filled with expletives and racial epithets. So most of her posts no longer have comments enabled.
Ditto for Michelle Malkin.
I love how Mike thinks he’s taking a stand against bigotry by lumping the American left into a monolithic cateogory, and making derogatory statements about us. Our party doesn’t rely on the support of southern racists the way yours does, thank God. Try electing a black person to any national position as a Republican before casting stones.
In each of these four quotes, Bush 41 is polite and offers an honest critique — Clinton’s Haiti policy was a disaster; the economy did recover in the second quarter of 1992; Hillarycare was a bad idea; the Clinton White House engaged in a kind of personally destructive politics never seen before.
And Bush seems to consistently offer a disclaimer or an apology for making a statement that may be seen as a criticism of the Clinton administration. Not once does he assert that Bill Clinton ruined or destroyed something that he personally accomplished. Not once does he try to change the historical record of his administration, or attempt to explain away his failures as the fault of Democrats. Not once does he accuse the Clinton White House of being incompetent. Not once does he demand that Bill Clinton apologize for his mistakes (Somalia, Waco, bombing the Chinese embassy, failing to stop the Rwandan genocide, letting Bin Laden go free, etc.)
Bill Clinton’s interview last Sunday, as well as his repeated comments during Bush 43’s presidency, serve no purpose other than to make Bill Clinton look like a hero. To this end, he will atttack Bush when it is politically expedient, then turn around and raise money for him.
Of course, Bush 41 had no real reason to attack Bill Clinton. But Bill Clinton still has a horse in the race, so to speak. And it is beyond doubt that he is trying to inocculate his wife against any criticisms of their “co-presidency.”
If you can only find four examples of mild-mannered, weak critiques from Bush 41 during eight years of Clinton, than it appears to me that Bush 41 was quite a gentleman.
Oh, the poor babies. Prominent lefty bloggers like Oliver, Atrios, Huffington, etc get mountains of abuse from the right, and yet still leave the comments turned on.
It’s not the expletives that are the problem - that’s just the excuse. The problem is commenters that demolish their arguments on their own blogs and make them look like fools. When any reader that sees the article also sees the rebuttals on the same page, it takes some of the gloss off.
You made a pun in french! Even if you didn’t mean it…”Quand même” pronounced “Con mem” means, roughly, nevertheless.
Malkin, Barber, and the others on the right simply cannot deal with comments. They shatter the bubbles they create for themselves.
Hey Oliver. Good post.
Dugger
No one pays me to defend Michelle Malkin, but here goes.
I read this blog daily, and while some of the comments are snarky I’ve never seen anything like this:
“Hi Self hating flat nosed Filipino Bitch! As we used to refer to your kind - little brown Fucking Machines. Looks like this little LBFM learned to whore in a different way to make some pesos. How sweet.”
“Malkin, you’re a dumb fucking whore. You’re a philipino piece of shit who should be wiping my ass. Go back to the massage parlor. Sucky sucky long time. How dare you thing you have any right to express any opinions in this country. You’re a joke. Go back to nursing school. Whore.”
And there are a lot more here: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001212.htm
The only other explanation is that Oliver spends a lot of time deleting comments that personally demean him because he is Black. He has never claimed to do that, so I would suspect he doesn’t have nearly that kind of problem.
Incidentally, both LaShawn and Michelle support trackbacks. If you want to rant about their blogs, both of them have suggested posting the rant on your own blog and then linking via trackback.
Mike, it certainly sucks that there are assholes out there who would go after Malkin that way. But you took those people and made them indicative of the “American Left” generally with no logic, no analysis, no evidence behind it at all. Just hate. Thanks for making your own prejudices so clear, Mike.
Mike quotes:
Hi Self hating flat nosed Filipino Bitch! As we used to refer to your kind - little brown Fucking Machines. Looks like this little LBFM learned to whore in a different way to make some pesos. How sweet.
Malkin, you re a dumb fucking whore. You re a philipino piece of shit who should be wiping my ass. Go back to the massage parlor. Sucky sucky long time. How dare you thing you have any right to express any opinions in this country. You re a joke. Go back to nursing school. Whore.
AND THOSE COMMENTS ARE FROM THE REPUBLICANS.
Thats funny, nobody seems to make a fuss when Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin leave comments on my message board. Some example below.
“Hey Teddy, you hate America cause you won’t believe everything our leader says. You liberal are all the same, why do you have to think so much? Can’t you just run around spewing the same buzzwords we here on the right use (moonbats, islamofascists, looney left)? It’s hard to use real words so we make new ones up. The latest one I am gooing to invent is “Coulterfantastic”. It basically refers to anything that is tall, blonde and lays there like a log when you bang it (W/ADAMS APPLE). P.S. love what you’ve dont with your curtaIns.”
-Ann C.
&
“Yeeeeeaahh Hawwwww, we gon round all yall liberal up and keep ya in a cage! lOOK AT ME, i KNOW WHAT THE HELL i AM TALKING ABOUT CAUSE i READ AND COPY EVERYTHING FROM lITTLE gREEN fUSEBALLS” i CANT EVEN FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP THIS CAPS LOCL THING”. Here I go, I am off to the mothership to refueal, I will holler at cha later. Damn Moonbat.”
-Chell