Njorl said:
His fiscal responsibility caused a boom in lenders confidence. Remember, the elder Bush had publicly stated that permanent deficit spending was acceptable. Without Clinton's bold increase in taxation, the costs associated with venture capital would have made the risky internet development unacceptable.
"Risky" is not a word that was in the vocabulary of venture-capitalists in the mid-late 90's. They gave money to virtually anyone who asked for it.
But if you
really want to give credit to Clinton for half of what happened under his term, you have to blame him for the other half too: BOOM->bust. He was still in the room when the bubble burst.
No war wins itself. Certainly, no war wins itself with no combat casualties.
I was referring, of course, to Kosovo/Yugoslavia. Up until then, no war had
ever been won without the use of ground troops. And that one was only won because the citizens overthrew their own government.
Do you know how much money Clinton saved Americans just by threatening to nationalize health care?
You're saying he failed on purpose as part of a larger plan? I'd like to see some proof of that. In any case, we had a healthcare problem then and it didn't go away. It continued to (and continues to) get worse.
Efforts were made. The millenial bomber was caught at a routine border stop but over 200 arrests worlwide were made from intelligence extracted from him.
He could't have been any luckier on that one. That's not effort, that's a bag of money falling into his lap from the sky. Good example.
What I mean by effort, though, was effort in pursuing the terrorists who attacked us half a dozen times during his presidency. He did just enough that it can't be said he did absolutely nothing (cruise missile attack or two). That isn't making an effort.
The African embassy bombings were significantly less damaging (to Americans) because of security improvements done by Clinton's State department. Do you think he should have gone to war over the Cole? Could any leader in the history of the world have prodded the American people to war over the Cole?
You don't need to go to war to make an effort. A thousand CIA agents (oops: Clinton cut human intel) and two SEAL teams could have halted the rise of Al Queda.
'"This is complete break from the way recessions are dated," Achuthan said. ' (from your own link)
You didn't stop reading there, did you? The change is being made becuase monthly GDP data
didn't used to be available for this purpose. Now that they have data, they can use it. Seeing as how GDP growth alone is the most common definition of a recession, just including it as one of the factors seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that a private company is changing the rules about defining recessions as we go into a razor close election.
Well, ok, if you'd prefer we can just throw out their opinion entirely and just use the historical definition: two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, which started with Q1 2001 (after a negative Q3 and stagnant Q4 2000).
But regardless of how you split that hair on when we went negative, it is quite clear that the downturn started at least 6 months before he left office, when the stock market peaked and GDP growth began to slow.
I see. Someone who gets done what the people want is not a leader.
Of course not! Yikes, Njorl, that's very surprising coming from you. If that were the way it worked, we'd be in a direct democracy not a representative one. We elect leaders
because they are better equipped to make tough decisions than we are, both because they are smarter and better educated than the average American and have a team of advisors to keep them better informed.
The common thread in all of the examples I gave is that Clinton was lucky for precisely that reason: he didn't
have to make tough/unpopular decisions because lucky things kept happening to him. And even when he did bad things (Somalia, ugh), people were too high on his lucky breaks to care.
Did your mother always give you a popsicle every time you wanted one?
A leader is someone who lies to the people to get their opinions to come in line with his.
Not sure where you would get the idea that I believe that - clearly you are making a Bush reference, but besides being OT, I've said repeatedly that I'm not a Bush fan and not likely to vote for him.
I think I have a reasonable opinion on why Clinton was a bad leader and lucky President, but my
personal dislike for the man comes from his treatment of the military as shown so clearly in Somalia. His incompetence got marines killed and instead of fixing his mistake he dishonored their sacrifice by giving up on the mission they died for. Their lives weren't worth the mission (which, btw, was saving other peoples' lives) or the few point drop in his approval rating their deaths cost him. I cannot respect a man of such weak character.
