Bill Clinton looking for action after daughter Chelsea weds

Why would Sestak abandon Senate pursuit for "a trifle?"

Is there a political errand that requires skirting the law and resorting to lawyerly evasion should it come to light? William Jefferson Clinton, reporting for duty, sir!
With the addition of Bill Clinton to a mix that included a Friday news dump and an exquisitely crafted exculpatory document from the White House counsel's office, the Joe Sestak job-offer scandal acquired a retro feel. Who knew "hope and change" would feel so 1998?

The Sestak affair boiled over during the last week. The Democratic congressman said months ago that the White House had attempted to keep him out of the Senate primary in Pennsylvania against party-switcher Arlen Specter by dangling a job offer. No one paid much attention until Sestak won, and when pressed on the Sunday shows, refused to say anything more about the matter in a Tony-worthy impression of "A Man with Something to Hide."

The White House kept insisting "trust us, nothing untoward happened," until even Democrats began to say they should be more forthcoming. That produced Friday's revelation of Clinton's involvement as an emissary to Sestak, and a 11/4-page long White House counsel "report" that sought to put the matter to rest in a matter of a mere seven paragraphs.

The document suggests that, at the behest of the White House, Clinton offered Sestak an unpaid position on a presidential advisory board to get him to stand down.

He might have had better luck if he'd offered him a choice Capitol Hill parking space. For a sitting congressman and former three-star admiral like Sestak, a spot on an advisory commission would be a nuisance to be avoided rather than a plum to be coveted, let alone at the price of his senatorial ambitions.

It's almost inconceivable that practiced political hands like Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff behind the gambit, would have considered such a trifle sufficient enticement to sway Sestak. Besides, the advisory role doesn't jibe with Sestak's words or body language over the last three months, all of which suggested he'd been offered a real, honest-to-goodness job - you know, one with a salary and maybe even health benefits and an office.

Are there no limits for this guy?

From Drudge: "Bill Clinton Rear Ended... "

Having mistakenly revealed his real intentions, Obama turns to Clinton-speak in search of deft and opaque message

Former President Bill Clinton weighed in Wednesday on two hot button topics — the Goldman Sachs controversy and the Arizona immigration law — with some outside the box thinking and deft political messaging.

Goldman may not be guilty of wrongdoing, Clinton said. On immigration, he expressed his famous empathy for the plight of Americans in border states.

Hours after the former president spoke, President Obama said much the same thing as Clinton on both topics.

Obama, speaking to reporters on Air Force One coming back to Washington from Illinois, indicated that Goldman Sachs traders may not have broken the law in a trade that is at issue in a civil suit being brought by the federal government.

Asked about the Goldman case, Obama said he didn’t want to comment on an ongoing suit, but said “even if it’s legal,” much of the activity on Wall Street “doesn’t seem to serve much of an economic purpose.”

That sounded similar — if a bit more equivocating — than Clinton’s remarks earlier in the day in Washington.

“I’m not at all sure they violated the law,” Clinton said of Goldman at a fiscal summit in Washington hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Institute, later adding it was “not self-evident” that Goldman did anything wrong.

Clinton, however, also questioned the value of much derivatives trading, stating that “too much of this stuff has no economic purpose no matter who wins or loses.”

How Bill Clinton exploited Oklahoma City bombing

What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton's presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.) In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress.

Clinton was in deep political trouble in April 1995. Six months earlier, voters had resoundingly rejected Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, giving the GOP control of both House and Senate. Polls showed the public viewed Clinton as weak, incompetent and ineffective. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his GOP forces seized the initiative on virtually every significant issue, while Clinton appeared to be politically dead. The worst moment may have come on April 18, the day before the bombing, when Clinton plaintively told reporters, "The president is still relevant here."

And then came the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building. In addition to seeing a criminal act and human loss, Clinton and Morris saw opportunity. If the White House could tie Gingrich, congressional Republicans and conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh to the attack, then Clinton might gain the edge in the fight against the GOP.

Morris began polling about Oklahoma City almost immediately after the bombing. On April 23, four days after the attack, Clinton appeared to point the finger straight at his political opponents during a speech in Minneapolis. "We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other," he said. "They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."

At a White House meeting four days later, on April 27, Morris presented Clinton with a comeback strategy based on his polling. Morris prepared an extensive agenda for the session, a copy of which he would include in the paperback version of his 1999 memoir, Behind the Oval Office.

You thought Bill Clinton had run out of absurdities?

Bill Clinton:

There was a story in The New York Times today by a reporter who’s been positively – and I say that in a positive way – positively interested in this, drawing parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today. That is a legitimate thing to do but I think it’s important before we overdo that to put this in the context of what happened to try to understand what happened then and what it meant for America and what it should mean to all of us in the way that we exercise our citizenship.

Before the bombing occurred, there was a sort of fever in America in the early 1990s.

My take:

If Clinton wants to make connections between horrendous events and antecedents, here are some that make a lot more sense than his Oklahoma City absurdity:

1. While in the White House Clinton turned the Oval Office into a personal bordello as murderous muslim fanatics in the Middle East plotted attacks against the United States, carrying one out at the World Trade Center in 1993.

2. In response to attacks and threats against the United States, Clinton made one attempt to strike directly at the terrorists. That attempt has been mocked as follows: "He fired a $2 million missile at a $10 tent and hit a camel in the ass."

A failed former leader with Clinton's record of ineptitude should think twice before accusing peaceful protesters who fear for their country of secretly plotting to do harm. It is Clinton's Democrat Party that poses the risk to the United States. It is the protesters who are trying to protect it.

That message will be delivered to Clinton in November in a way he will understand.

Is the scene set for a replay of Clinton and the 90s?

The undertakers of Bill Clinton's political doom showed up in Little Rock, Ark., in 1992 for a meeting with the president-elect two months before his inauguration. They were the leaders of the Democratic Congress, and they might as well have been draped in black crepe.

"You can trust us," House Speaker Tom Foley told Clinton, in an assurance as false as it was sincere. "We all want to make this administration succeed."

Two years later, Clinton stood among smoldering political ruins. Democrats had lost both houses of Congress. A Republican upstart had defeated Tom Foley. In trusting the Democratic leadership in Congress, Clinton had nearly destroyed his presidency.

He learned a bitter lesson in the perils of trying to govern a center-right country in league with a left-wing Congress. It's not an accident that the most sustained period of political success for any of the last three Democratic presidents, outside of their initial honeymoons, came after Clinton lost Congress. Only then was he forced to govern from the center.

Bill Clinton jokes at Gridiron about spring - "known to Al Gore as proof of global warming"

Former President Bill Clinton made a return to Washington’s public life, speaking to the annual Gridiron Dinner as a stand-in for President Barack Obama and poking some fun at himself, his Oval Office successors and the press corps before getting in pitches for passage of health legislation and aid to Haiti.

Mr. Clinton, known to friend and foe alike as a gifted political orator, showed he hasn’t lost much in that category in the nine years since he left the White House. Presidential speeches to the Gridiron—an organization of Washington journalists—are supposed to be humorous, and Mr. Clinton knew the drill well from his time as a regular dinner guest during his term.

So he got loosened up at Saturday night’s white-tie dinner with a joke at his own expense: “I have been waiting to stand in for President Obama for a long time,” he said, “ and since they turned me down for Dancing with the Stars, I had nothing better to do.”

He said President Obama called to asked him to fill in because the current president was busy in the White House “polishing up his Nobel Peace Prize.” Obama, he said, asked: “You’ve got one of these, don’t you?”–a joke rooted in reports Mr. Clinton is unhappy that the current president got a Nobel Prize after only months in office while Mr. Clinton failed to be awarded one after long efforts to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East.

No deem and pass for Obamacare? The implications, regrettably, are unfunny

Democrats dropped their scheme plan to employ a deem and pass strategy for Obamacare Saturday after former president Bill Clinton posed a simple question: "What does the word deem mean?"

The question reminded longtime Washington inmates of Clinton's statement during impeachment hearings that he was puzzled about "what the meaning of the word is is" more than a decade ago. Clinton was subsequently impeached by the House, which pretends to oppose Oval Office carousing, but was not convicted by the Senate, which has no such pretensions.

Besides, Clinton's former playmate, Monica Lewinsky, has since graduated from the London School of Economics, and members of the U.S. Congress are terrified that she might embarrass them by pointing out the outlandishness of the numbers they routinely use to sell bad legislation, like Obamacare.

It could not be determined immediately what impact the trashing of deem and pass will have on congressional plans to deem a birth certificate for Barack Obama and to deem a witness to his presence as a student at Columbia University.

After two Democrat presidencies upended by health care, will the certitudes change?

In fact, the Brown election can be seen as the closing of the door on a two-decade era in which Democrats, Republicans, and most of the political class came to believe that the Democrats possessed an inherent electoral advantage on the health-care issue. The history of the past 20 years reveals two Democratic presidencies, first Bill Clinton’s and now Barack Obama’s, upended by health care, whereas a single administration—that of a Republican, George W. Bush—benefited from it. In 2004, Bush was able to secure a narrow re-election victory in part because of his success in securing a form of targeted health-care reform through the creation of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

The combination of Democratic wishful thinking and an American electorate suspicious of the intentions of those pushing relentlessly for an ever greater government involvement in health care has proved a ballot-box disaster for Democrats. How did this happen? And why?

Bill Clinton's North Korea adventure: the movie

Hollywood wrote script for Bill Clinton's NK drama

"Bill Clinton's triumphant return from North Korea with two rescued US journalists had Hollywood written all over it -- from the Burbank airport to the big-time producer who bankrolled the expedition to the celebrity public-relations firm that orchestrated the homecoming.

A key player in Clinton's high-flying diplomatic mission to rescue Laura Ling and Euna Lee was entertainment mogul Steve Bing, a longtime "Friend of Bill" who lent the ex-president his private Boeing 737.

The multimillionaire mogul paid about $200,000 in fuel and other costs that came with the trans-Pacific flight.

Bing's Shangri-La entertainment firm also funded a major logistical effort to carefully showcase Clinton's arrival in Tinseltown -- which featured Ling lauding the former president while almost in tears."

Bill takes to sky with two women; no one asks

The mainstream media is setting a new standard for fecklessness.

Imagine, Bill (Stud) Clinton obtained the release of two attractive young women in North Korea and the trio flew back on the same plane from the other side of the world. As far as I can tell, not one reporter has inquired about what happened on that airplane.

Was Clinton smiling when he debarked? Did he look tired? Did Hillary glance at Bill accusingly?

I tell you, it's like a news blackout.

How important is it, in politics, to keep pants on?

"You'd think the Monica Lewinsky scandal would have settled the issue once and for all. Democrats found themselves excusing Clinton's conduct, and Republicans who condemned it wound up on the losing side in both public opinion and the impeachment battle.

When it was over, Clinton left office with a 65 percent approval rating. Trust him with your daughter? Not a chance. But your economy? Sure.

George W. Bush, by contrast, finished his term with an approval rating of 22 percent. Trust him with your daughter? Sure. But keep him away from the economy! Both parties could have drawn the same conclusion: Voters have more important things to worry about than their leaders' sex lives.

Yet here we are again, disqualifying a possible White House aspirant because he couldn't keep his pants on."

http://townhall.com/columnists/SteveChapman/2009/06/28/why_adultery_is_political_suicide

Only Clinton rated worse than Obama at 100 days

"President Obama's media cheerleaders are hailing how loved he is. But at the 100-day mark of his presidency, Mr. Obama is the second-least-popular president in 40 years.

According to Gallup's April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama's current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/28/
baracks-in-the-basement/

Dem fraudster linked to Mexican drug dealers

"The SEC's fraud charges may be the least of accused financial scammer R. Allen Stanford's worries. Federal authorities tell ABC News that FBI and others have been investigating whether Stanford was involved in laundering drug money for Mexico's notorious Gulf Cartel.

Federal regulators on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009 charged Stanford and three of his companies with a "massive fraud" that centered around high-interest-rate CDs.

Authorities tell ABC News that as part of the investigation, which has been ongoing since last year, Mexican authorities detained one of Stanford's private planes. According to officials, checks found inside the plane were believed to be connected to the Gulf cartel, reputed to be Mexico's most violent gang. Authorities say Stanford could potentially face criminal charges of money laundering and bribery of foreign officials.

Authorities say the SEC action against Stanford Tuesday may have complicated the federal drug investigation.

The federal investigation, however, did not stop Stanford from using corporate money to become a big man at last year's Democratic convention in Denver.

A video posted on the firm's web-site shows Stanford, now sought by U.S. Marshals, being hugged by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and praised by former President Bill Clinton for helping to finance a convention-related forum and party put on by the National Democratic Institute."

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6907429&page=1