Mid-Term
Election Post Mortem
By Mickey Z.
10 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
So, the Democrats have a majority
in Congress. The bad times are over. The evil ones have been vanquished.
Let's go ahead and declare world peace, an end to global warming, and
O'Reilly Factor. I mean, what could be better, right? Hmm, we could
also have a Democratic president to go along with a Democratic Senate
and Democratic House. Can you say Hillary Rodham Clinton, boys and girls?
Imagine that: A pinko by the name of Clinton running the White House
with a merry band of liberals calling all the shots in Congress. How
grand it would be...
Well, if you want a good idea of how things may go under the above scenario,
you might want to reflect back upon the years of 1993 and 1994 because
that's when President William Jefferson Clinton was enjoying the "advantage"
of a Democratically-controlled Congress.
In just two years, the notorious liberal managed to abandon his pledge
to consider offering asylum to Haitian refugees, renege on his promise
to "take a firm stand" against the armed forces' ban on gays
and lesbians, and back away from his most high-profile campaign issue:
health care. He also signed the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), increased the Pentagon
budget by another $25 billion, fired Jocelyn Elders, dumped Lani Guinier,
ordered the bombing of Iraq and the Balkans, renewed the murderous sanctions
on Iraq, ignored genocide in Rwanda, deported hundreds of thousands
of "illegal" immigrants, and passed a crime bill that gave
us more cops, more prisons, and 58 more offenses punishable by death.
(All this came before the
much-hyped Republican "revolution" in 1994. Can someone please
explain to me why the right wing didn't like this guy?)
Then we have the environment-allegedly Bill Clinton and Vice President
Al Gore's domain. In 1996, David Brower, former president of the Sierra
Club, penned a Los Angeles Times op-ed entitled, "Why I Won't Vote
for Clinton." In this piece, Brower offered a litany of Clinton
administration moves, which utterly smashed the public image of Bubba
and Gore as "pro-environment." Some of these moves include:
The passage of the salvage logging rider, the continuation of the use
of methyl bromide, the weakening of the Endangered Species Act, the
lowering of grazing fees on land, subsidizing Florida's sugar industry,
weakening the Safe Drinking Water Act, reversing the ban on the production
and importation of PCBs, and allowing the export of Alaskan oil.
These, and other proud Clinton/Gore accomplishments, led Brower to declare
that the dynamic Democratic duo had "done more harm to the environment
in three years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in 12 years."
That's Bush the Elder he's talking about, of course. As for Bush the
Lesser, consider this: the total logging cut in national forest during
his first three years of Dubya's reign was less than the annual logging
cut in national forests was under Clinton (Bill, not Hillary).
This story had both a moral and a lesson to be learned, if we are willing
to hear it before 2008. There is one primary difference between the
Democrats and Republicans: They tell different lies to get elected.
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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