Does Bill Clinton know how to do anything else other than lie*?

(*and cheat on his wife?)

Earlier today in my morning links, I wrote briefly about Bill Clinton’s latest big fib, this one about how he supposedly was against the Iraq war “from the start,” but wanted to devote a post solely to the issue this evening, because Bubba has been in the news alot today, and it deserves extended commentary.

First things first, Captain Ed has written about Clinton’s Iraq comments here, and has quite possibly the most damning evidence to use against Clinton’s “I was against it from the start” claim. Clinton’s managed to do what most politicians can’t do and that’s cause the both the right and left to agree with each other on the assertion that Bill Clinton is flat out full of it on the issue of whether or not he supported the Iraq war.

Ron Fournier has an interesting column up today that should have been titled “Bill’s Baaaaaack.” In the column, he talked about in Clinton’s now infamous speech yesterday in Iowa where he made the Iraq comments, he was his typically self-centered self, even though he was there to promote his wife’s candidacy:

DES MOINES, Iowa – As only he can do, Bill Clinton packed campaign venues across eastern Iowa and awed Democratic voters with a compelling case for his wife’s candidacy. He was unscripted, in-depth and generous.

He also was long-winded, misleading and self-absorbed.

“Good Bill” and “Bad Bill” (his nickname among some aides) returned to the public arena Tuesday as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton brandished her double-edged sword of a husband to fend off rivals in the Jan. 3 caucus fight.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Clinton told 400 Iowans at the start of his three-city swing, “I have had a great couple of days out working for Hillary.”

In the next 10 minutes, he used the word “I” a total of 94 times and mentioned “Hillary” just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife’s candidacy.

He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast.

He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu.

He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way.

And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people.

“I know what it takes to be president,” he said, “and because of the life I’ve led since I’ve left office.”

I, me and my. Oh, my.

Real Clear Politics blogger Tom Bevan was at one of the Bill Clinton events yesterday, and wrote a reminder about how persuasive Clinton can be when he tries to work a room, and how is a very effective campaigner for his wife, and believes it’s primarily because Clinton is trying to use the “two for one” selling point just like he and Hillary did the first time he ran for president. “Vote for Hillary,” he’s essentially saying, “and you’ll get the third term from me you wished you’d been able to do in 2000.”

And in the end, that’s really what all of Bill Clinton’s “campaigning for Hillary” is all about : his chance to get back into the White House, to serve out that third term he by law couldn’t run for. Let’s not forget that he’s in favor of “modifying” the 22nd amendment, which would mean he could run for another term as president. Let’s also not forget about some of the things Mr. Legacy-obsessed claimed he could have resolved had he just had four more years in office:

1. He needed just a little bit more time to work things out with North Korea so they wouldn’t go the nuclear route, even though they actually never stopped in spite of the Clinton-Carter “agreed framework” farce.

2. He would have “kept up” his “obsession” (?) with Osama bin Laden (and Al Qaeda), very possibily “preventing” 9-11, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t “obsessed” enough with OBL to capture him when he had the chanceS to, and wasn’t worried enough about the threat from Al Qaeda to the point where he would give intelligence agencies and law enforcement the tools and legal leeway they needed to find and capture them.

3. He would have been successful at negotiating a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel, regardless of the fact that 8 years of attempts proved fruitless.

This guy is actually delusional (and self-centered) enough to believe that “just a little more time” would have resolved all those problems, when nothing he did to try and resolve them worked in the first place – in fact, the problems only got worse and were inherited by the Bush administration in January 2001, contrary to revisionists like Bill Clinton and his faithful followers who enjoy claiming that Bush ‘created’ these problems.

Never underestimate the power of Bill Clinton to embellish his leadership credentials and outright lie about his record by using his gift of gentle persuasion via use of the ‘aw gosh, shucks’ Southern boy charm. And never underestimate his supporters ability to stand by him in the face of his blatant dishonesty.

But ST, you may ask, if Clinton supporters were so gullible, then why are they taking him to task for the Iraq statements he made yesterday, which you talked about earlier in this post? The answer: Keep in mind that if Clinton was lying about anything else, the same liberals criticizing him now would be covering for him just like they did during his time as president, where he turned lying and dishonesty into an art form. But because this is about the left’s sore spot – the war in Iraq – the normal rules don’t apply.

All that said, I’m glad the issue of the Clintons (both of them) support for the Iraq war has come to the forefront again. Yeah, arguing about the rationale for the Iraq war with the Usual Suspects gets tiresome after a while, because they’d rather believe in the fantasy that shortly after he “stole” the presidency, GWB manufactured the WMD evidence against Saddam Hussein. But it’s important to talk about because it gets out into the open not only she-who-might-be-president’s then versus now stance on Iraq, but Bill Clinton’s then versus now stance on Iraq, too. And for anyone interested in learning the truth about that, it’s not hard to find.

The truth about Clinton’s stance cuts into the heart of the far left’s arguments about Bush supposedly “lying” about Iraq’s WMD programs: Clinton believed Saddam had WMD and so did many others in his administration. This is a truth that not only the far left has only recently been willing to confront, and one that a desperate-to-get-back-into-the-WH Bill Clinton apparently has recently decided he wants buried deep underground.

Will the mediots question the Bubster on his contradictory stance on supporting the war in Iraq? Probably not. They’ve already seen how Bill Clinton reacts when he’s not thrown softball questions.

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