The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Just a few random thoughts today….

U I am sad to report that the Road to a National Championship for by beloved Northern Iowa Panthers had ended, with the Number 1 ranked Panthers falling to Delaware 39 to 27. The Panthers end their season 12-1. This coming on the heals of my Green Bay Packers losing to Dallas on Thursday has made this a very sad week for me indeed. Sigh….

U Old News: Those of you that have read my Blog previously know that I have trumpeted the banner of liberal media bias in the past, and I have a new one to share with you. Actually it’s an old one that I just learned about, but this is SO BLATANT that even I was shocked, and the left rarely shock me anymore.

In May of 2003, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote this about President Bush: “Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. ‘Al Qaeda is on the run’ President Bush said last week. ‘That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated… They’re not a problem anymore.”

Here’s a clue: ANYTIME you are reading a liberal columnist, and there are those three little dots - … - That generally means they are hiding something, usual the part of the quote that blows their theory out of the water. Below is the full quote from President Bush:

“Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, They’re not a problem anymore.”

Was Bush implying Al Qaeda was not a problem anymore? Of course not, and anyone with half a brain – including Maureen Dowd – knows that. What Bush was saying was that the Al Qaeda operatives that were either dead or jailed were no longer a problem. And while Dowd is not a journalist, but rather a columnist, the Times knew damn well what she was up to and let it happen.

U Even Older News: I know a lot of people on the right were pissed off during the Clinton years because they seemed to get away with everything (Travelgate, Whitewater, etc….), and just as we were able to put that behind us up comes Clinton II, The Hillary years, where once again we are seeing scandal after scandal appear (fund raising, planted questions…) And she, like Bill, seem to get a pass from the press. Oh, they report on it, but they let it go as soon as they can.

Now before I get any further, I can already hear my Liberal friends screaming that George Bush has gotten away with murder as well, and there is some truth to that. I don’t deny it.

Well, I ran across an interesting tid bit regarding Whitewater the other day that I had never known before, and I thought I would share it with you. Now we all know that Whitewater stunk to high heaven, and there was “unethical” stamped on this mess in huge red letters. However, the Clinton apologists take on this has always been “If the Clintons did anything wrong, why weren’t they prosecuted?” Hey, it’s a fair question.

The Clintons have always claimed that the Office of Independent Counsel on Whitewater exonerated them, that the report found no wrongdoing.

The fact is, all the Independent Counsel said was that “The evidence was insufficient” to prove that the Clintons did anything wrong. Why were they unable to find the evidence? Well, two people knew “where the bodies were buried”, and one of them – Jim McDougal – was dead. The other, his wife Susan, refused to cooperate and was jailed for contempt (and later rewarded with a pardon by the Clintons).

What does that prove? Absolutely nothing. However – and this is what I recently learned – probably the best indication of guilt on behalf of the Clintons is that they didn’t get their legal fees reimbursed by the federal government. According to the statute under which an Independent Cousel operates, ANYONE who is the object of a special prosecutor’s scrutiny is entitled to reimbursement for legal fees if charges are not filed AND the if the targets of the inquiry “show that a career prosecutor would not have pursued a similar investigation or delved as deeply.”

But the panel that reviewed the Clinton’s petition for $3.5 million in reimbursement ruled their request without merit, and awarded them only 3% of the amount requested (the amount due the lawyers for reviewing the final report). By contrast, President Reagan was reimbursed for 75% of his legal costs in the Iran-Contra scandal. The clear message: Regardless of the final, inconclusive verdict, any competent prosecutor would have smelled something rotten in Whitewater.

You would think that having to pay over $3 million in legal fees is punishment enough, and I would tend to agree, IF the Clintons actually paid those fees. The truth is, despite the fact that Bill and Hillary’s book advances alone brought them $18 million, and Bill’s annual income from speech making is over $10 million a year, they themselves did not pay a penny of these legal costs. Instead, the cost that were paid came from a “legal defense fund”, loaded from payments from special interest groups. And even to this day, hundreds of thousands of Whitewater legal bills have gone unpaid. That my friends, is a scandal unto itself.