The Bush II Years - Aberration or the logical culmination of recent US history? [View All]

[JackRiddler]

TEXT FOR DEBATE:
http://counterpunch.org/stclair02212007.html

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR: (...)

The Clinton administration opened the doors for Bush Junior in ways that Junior's father never did. (...) Because in so many ways, Clinton provided the final transition between decaying old-style liberalism and the new neoliberalism and neoconservatism--which are kind of incestuous first cousins.

That goes for trade policy; for deregulation of major industries, from the utilities to communications companies to the banking industry to the insurance industry; all the way to continuing to wage war on Iraq. All of that is a living artifact of Clinton Time.

It goes for the USA PATRIOT Act. People say they rushed in the Patriot Act--this thousand-page bill that the person who wrote it probably didn't even have a chance to read. Well, the fact is that the Patriot Act had been sitting on the desk at the Department of Justice for the last two years of Clinton Time. They were all ready to update their horrendous and horrifying Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was passed in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing.

For a lot of these things, the left has a case of political Alzheimer's disease. That's the most gracious way of putting it--how they could immediately wipe from their minds every betrayal of Clinton Time, and heap all of it on poor Bush...

WHAT DO YOU THINK?