“In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?  Concerned . . .”

My, my. We cannot allow Congress and the American public to actually know that our incompetence cost American lives.

So Hicks was demoted for not toeing the Obama party line. That earned a big yawn, actually, a non-mention in the LA Times, which ran Benghazi on page three and focused largely on the politics.

(The LA Times had a front page story about how the testing procedure for Mexican police was controversial. That issue has been troubling me for weeks. They also had a story about unions objecting to a possible sale of the Times to the Koch brothers, claiming it could make the paper partisan. Ha.)

Let’s recall the scandal ginned up by the Democrats in 2007 over Bush’s firing of seven US Attorneys, all of whom serve at the will of the president. (President Clinton fired all 93 of them upon taking office in 1993 without a peep.)

The Democrats and the media (forgive my redundancy) made a huge deal of this, which ultimately led to the resignation of the nation’s first Latino Attorney General, Alberto Gonsales.

The charge was that Bush had politicized the DOJ.

Yesterday, Hicks alleged that word came from the top of the State Department not to talk to a GOP Congressman on a fact-finding tour of Benghazi. They even assigned lawyers to babysit him.

So who is being accused of politicizing Benghazi? Rhetorical question.

…the onetime wife of Marc Rich, she was a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

She was very generous to the Clintons and Bill repaid her with a presidential pardon for Marc on his way out of the White House. (One of a few sleazy pardons issued by the sleazy president.)

There are 4,000 Americans affiliated with offshore accounts identified in the documents. Among them is Denise Rich, a Grammy-nominated socialite who helped secure the presidential pardon of her ex-husband, Mark Rich, who was indicted on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. As of April 2006, she had $144 million stashed in a trust in the Cook Islands. She gave up her U.S citizenship in 2011 for Austrian citizenship

That’s from a post on the Daily Beast about rich people using offshore accounts. Instapundit notes:

The pardon, as this story fails to mention, was granted by Bill Clinton. Attorney General Eric Holder was instrumental in securing it.

A Secretary of State is foremost a manager. Competent managers, like symphony conductors, know how to get the best performance from their players.

During her testimony before Congress, Hillary blamed not knowing that Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been pleading for better security in Benghazi, saying that 1.4 million cables come in every year. How’s a girl to cope?

Elliott Abrams, who served as an undersecretary of state, explains how.

More often, a secretary of state sees the cables that his or her staff pulls out because they are important and should be seen. Figuring out what the incumbent secretary wants to see, will wish to see, and will be angry for not having seen is very difficult when there’s a new secretary — but what is Hillary Clinton’s excuse on September 11, 2012, after almost four years in office? There had been three and half years to set up a system, to let the career officers of the Secretariat and the Operations Center know what she wants, and to have her personal staff figure it out too.

That is to say, if she did not see the Benghazi cables in a timely fashion, if she did not see Chris Stephens’s cables describing the deterioration of security, and if she did not see his requests for more security, this was a huge management failure on her part. It is a poor excuse to say, “Gee, the Department gets lots of cables” — and perhaps even worse then to hide behind an Accountability Review Board that pins responsibility on assistant secretaries and no higher.

Having worked as an assistant secretary of state and a deputy national-security adviser, I can report that even in those posts one is entirely swamped by cable traffic and needs a system to cope with it — to be sure that the really important ones get through. From all the available evidence, Hillary Clinton failed to establish such a system for herself, and that management failure is a far more important fact about her tenure than being the third woman to hold the post or having flown more miles than Condoleezza Rice.

Benghazi is two scandals: the negligence that led to the death of four Americans and the media’s failure to take this seriously.

Peter Kirsanow:

Watching Hillary pull off her illogical tap dance to rave reviews, brought to mind this scene from Seinfeld.

The setup: Peggy, the woman at left, had mistakenly started calling Elaine “Susie” and then “Suze” to Elaine’s great irritation, although she never corrects her. Peterman calls a meeting of the “three” women to sort it all out.

I’m always willing to help a gal out, so here:

Inspired by Vanderleun’s

Hillary Clinton decided that the best defense was to be offensive. First, the clip:

What difference does it make at this point, you ask?

1. If you truly want to prevent further deaths, Hillary, you must first understand what went wrong in Benghazi.
2. The American people deserve straight answers from their government. You work for us, lady. Don’t get all huffy when pressed to explain the blatant BS you spewed to protect Obama before the election.
3. Choke up all you want about the four dead Americans, but we know your State Department denied requests to secure the consulate. You have blood on your hands. Tears, sincere or fake, won’t wash it away.

The Clintons both have brass balls and an excess of gall. It would nice if the GOP stopped bringing a water pistol to a knife fight.

Jim Geraghty sums up the gloomy meaning of it all:

When we look at how our government has responded to the night of September 11 in Benghazi, Libya, we see there are truly no standards any more.
If the decision making before, during, and after the Benghazi attack is insufficient to get anyone fired, what decision in government will ever warrant that consequence?

If Democrats on Capitol Hill can’t take off their partisan blinders for one day to attempt to hold people accountable for decision-making that resulted in American deaths at the hands of extremists, and then lying to the public about it, then when will they ever?

If Hillary Clinton can exclaim that it doesn’t matter that the administration spent five days talking about a video when the video had nothing to do with it, and everyone on her side applauds, why should she or anyone else ever respond to an accusation with anything but audacious defiance?

This is it, folks. This is the government we have, and the lack of a public outcry about Benghazi ensures this is the government we will have for the foreseeable future.

Wha? Bill Clinton told a bold-faced lie?

“Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.”

— Former president Bill Clinton, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 9, 2013

For an explanation of why that is completely untrue, read the WaPo Fact Checker.

Clinton was named the “Father of the Year” by the National Father’s Day Council on Wednesday.

The group selected Clinton for his “profound generosity, leadership and tireless dedication to both his public office and many philanthropic organizations,” Dan Orwig, chairman of the National Father’s Day Committee, said in the announcement.

Drudge has this item illustrated with a photo of Slick Willie with Monica Lewinsky.

Two thoughts:

• Being a good father necessitates being a good husband. He’s a cheat and liar. That’s the behavior he modeled.
• Clinton did nothing about the African AIDS crisis. As millions became orphans, Bill whined that the GOP wouldn’t let him help. George W. Bush did help and saved an estimated 2 million lives.

No, he had a GOP Congress that controlled spending.

Ed Morrissey

…We’re also seeing Clinton nostalgia in a more concrete sense as we barrel towards the fiscal cliff, which both parties set up in two previous rounds of negotiations over spending and tax policies.  Hearkening back to gauzy memories of prosperity in the late 1990s, Democrats have argued in the last few months that a return to Clinton-era tax rates won’t hurt the economy.

That isn’t exactly a new argument, but it is one that Democrats have used more frequently as Republicans argue that tax hikes will damage the currently stagnant economy and already-anemic job creation.  Bill Clinton raised taxes and the economy grew in the late 1990s – so why not do the same thing again?

That argument ignores a lot of the context in both the current economy and the economy of the 1990s.  As we approached the middle of the decade, the Internet’s economic potential began to explode – and investment followed, and the economy leaped into high gear.   So much capital flowed into this brand-new market that the trend became irrational, producing the dot-com bubble that popped as Clinton was leaving office.

This produced the recession of 2000-1, which became exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Bush-era tax rates reversed the recession and produced solid economic growth for more than three years, as well as increases in federal income-tax revenue and decreases in the federal deficit, as this chart from Investors Business Daily based on White House data demonstrates:

…That bubble also started in the Clinton era, albeit with plenty of assistance from Republicans who wanted to be seen as promoting home ownership and fairness.  Congress under control of both parties gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to create mortgage-backed securities on bad loans in order to fund this bubble.    When housing prices inevitably snapped, after a ten-year holiday from their traditional linkage to the rate of inflation, vast sums of imaginary wealth disappeared nearly overnight.In other words, the prosperity of the Clinton years was in significant part a fiction based on irrational market behavior, boosted in one instance by significant distortion introduced by government policy.  That’s also true for a good part of the Bush-era prosperity, as the irrational housing valuations lured homeowners into the habit of treating their homes as ATMs to cash out on rapidly-rising equity, which crashed out in 2008.

But the deficit crisis didn’t come from a reduction in federal income-tax revenue from George Bush’s tax policies, as we can see above.  As far as relating it today, we have no new emerging market on the scale of the Internet on which to count for future economic growth, at least not at the moment, to balance out the constrictive impact of seizing more capital through tax hikes.

New York Magazine

…Which is not to say that Clinton was shy of opinions regarding Obama’s performance in office. On policy, there was no daylight between them: Clinton was for Obama’s stimulus, Wall Street reregulation, and especially health-care reform—and was vastly impressed by Obama’s ability to get it passed, as Clinton had been unable to do.

Two points: Clinton was elected with just 43% of the popular vote (remember Ross Perot?) and screwed up his first two years in office that the voters gave Congress to the GOP.

Also, Clinton’s financial deregulation and push for subprime lending played a big part in the meltdown.

At the same time, he was baffled by Obama’s failures at the basic blocking and tackling of politics, his insularity, and his alienation of the business community. As a former Clinton hand put it to the Washington Post, “He thinks that Obama gets all the hard stuff right but doesn’t do the easy stuff at all.”

Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

Yet behind Obama’s stand offishness was something more elemental: He didn’t think he needed Clinton. He believed his administration was successful, that things were going fine. Then came the 2010 midterms and the shellacking administered to his party by the Republicans. Suddenly, the world changed—and Clinton’s phone began to ring.

This is a recurring theme: Obama is a stiff with people and he’s a cocky know-it-all, the worst combination in president who took office with zero executive experience.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took responsibility Monday night for any security failures leading up to the consulate attack last month in Libya that killed the American ambassador, but she seemed to push back against claims of a cover-up, blaming the “fog of war” for the Obama administration’s shifting explanations for the attack.

One wonders: did Slick Willy help craft that line of bull?

Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in the assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Administration officials initially suggested that the attack was “spontaneous” violence that grew out of protests over an anti-Islam film, rather than a premeditated attack.

Which they knew was untrue.

It later became clear that intelligence officials suspected terrorism almost immediately, and investigators now think extremists tied to Al Qaeda carried out a coordinated attack, with no evidence that the attack was preceded by a protest outside the consulate.

Clinton, however, attributed the administration’s shifting story to “the confusion you get in any type of combat situation.”

David Frum at the Daily Beast

As Bill Clinton collects his accolades, let’s recall: the key decisions that inflated the housing bubble of the 2000s – and that laid waste to the US economy in 2008 — were taken under Bill Clinton’s administration:

• the decision to leave derivative trading unregulated
• the decision to allow deposit-taking institutions to engage in proprietary trading
• the pressure on banks to relax mortgage lending standards
• the decision to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to grow enormously large thanks to the implicit subsidy of the government guarantee of their bonds and borrowing.

If President Obama inherited a mess not of his own making, it should be remembered of whose making the mess was.

Also, whatever great economic

Obama swallowed his pride and invited Bill Clinton to save his bacon last night.

And it almost worked, says Jim Geraghty. Almost.

Bill Clinton saved Republicans by being self-indulgent.

Because, for about ten to fifteen minutes last night, ol’ Bubba’s mojo was working. Clinton is the best speaker the Democrats have — much better than Obama. Just one serving of Clinton’s emoting demonstrates how overrated Obama’s in-this-moment-we-make-history grandeur shtick is. So they gave Clinton the toughest assignments: Persuade the public that the so-called “recovery” is the best anyone could have hope for, that none of the Republican criticisms of Obama raise any legitimate points, and that there really is reason to believe that the next four years will be better than the past four.

Clinton has a gift for making the unreasonable sound reasonable and making the reasonable sound unreasonable, and it worked for the first . . . ten to fifteen minutes or so. But somewhere around “partnership, not partisanship” — a sentiment completely at odds with every other speech given at this convention, and about 99 percent of the messaging from the Obama campaign and its allied super PACs — the speech became a bridge too far. And then it went on. And on. And on. Longer than Clinton’s much-mocked 1988 keynote address.

The nightly newscasts were delayed considerably. The comments on Twitter became less adoring and cheering and more and more questions about when Clinton would wrap it up. And Clinton’s speech just kept going.

As the sections continued, it became clear that this is what Bill Clinton lives for — how he misses the excitement, the attention, the power. . . . The presidency is like a drug, and while I’m sure his post-presidential life has its perks — though he is a vegan now — nothing is quite like having an arena full of adoring fans, hanging on your every word, ready to applaud and cheer your every utterance. The two-term limit is the only thing that is keeping him from running again.

And the speech just kept going.

The man impeached for committing perjury accused Republicans of lying. And the speech just kept going.

The man who embarrassed his most loyal fans and followers and staff by engaging in wildly reckless behavior and then offering implausible explanations and even more implausible excuses, who once suggested the political rhetoric of his foes motivated Timothy McVeigh, now insisted that politics “can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.” And the speech just kept going.

Somehow it seemed fitting that the remaining viewers who were still watching were, in all likelihood, doing so in bed.

By the time it ended, everyone forgot that Bill Clinton began his tribute to President Obama by saluting his excellent judgment in whom to marry. I wonder how the secretary of state interpreted that remark.

Weekly Standard

Former President Bill Clinton tried to get former senator Ted Kennedy to endorse Hillay Clinton for president in the 2008 election by describing Barack Obama this way: “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.”

This anecdote is revealed in a New Yorker article on the relationship between Bill Clinton and Obama:

Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.”

Clinton is giving a keynote address at the Democratic convention this week in Charlotte, North Carolina.

That can’t be racist because, y’know, Clinton was the first black president.

So, four years later, with the economy worse and trillions in new debt, Slick Willy says we should keep going with Obama’s plan.

Supposedly, we’re to credit Clinton with great economic stewardship. But consider:

• Clinton took office with a booming economy and left with an economy in recession
• He was prevented from behaving like a Democrat by a GOP Congress for six of his eight years
• The tech boom, which he had no part in creating, generated vast wealth and tax revenue.

This speech was given two years ago.

<iframe title=”MRC TV video player” width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.mrctv.org/embed/114004″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

Bill Clinton was touting his record of having four balanced budgets. Let’s remember:

• Clinton inherited a booming economy when he took office
• Clinton lost control of Congress after two years and was held in check by a GOP that actually cared about controlling spending, unlike the GOP under Dubya.
• Much of the boom people remember was the tech/Internet bubble. One, Clinton had nothing to do with creating it. Two, it blew up in 2000 and the nation went into a recession.

He got the ball started on the mortgage meltdown. First, by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (a GOP initiative) and then using the Community Reinvestment Act to force lenders to make subprime loans to minorities.

Anyone paying attention can understand how Bill Clinton, in the Obama ad touting Obama’s supposed courage in okaying the Bin Laden mission, could equate a political loss with the death of Navy Seals.

That’s how shallow and self-involved Bill Clinton was and is. And his gutlessness cost American lives on 9/11. And 800,000 lives in Rwanda.

As NewsBusters noted while the media celebrated Bill Clinton’s involvement in an Obama campaign ad spiking the bin Laden’s dead football, the former President should never have appeared in such a video given his administration having passed on numerous opportunities to kill or capture the al Qaeda leader before 9/11.

On Sunday, CBS’s 60 Minutes detailed such an occurrence in late summer 1999 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Read more:

Victor Davis Hanson

Former president Bill Clinton just appeared in a reelection television commercial for President Barack Obama. At one point, Clinton weighs in on the potential consequences of Obama’s decision to go ahead with the planned assassination of Osama bin Laden. He smiles and then pontificates, “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].”

That’s an astonishing statement, and quite revealing.

There is a lot that is disturbing about Clinton’s commentary — and about the fact that such an embarrassment was not deleted by the Obama campaign. Clinton offers unintended self-incrimination as to why in the 1990s he did not order the capture of bin Laden when it might well have been in his power to do so — was it fear of something “horrible” that might have happened to his fortunes rather than to our troops?

And, of course, such crass politicization of national security and the war on terror is exactly what Barack Obama accused the two Clintons of in the 2008 Democratic primaries. We also remember that Obama on several occasions chastised George W. Bush for supposedly making reference to the war on terror for political advantage, though he never did so in as creepy a fashion as Clinton. And aside from the fact that Barack Obama promised never to “spike the football” by using the SEAL mission to score campaign points, only a narcissistic Bill Clinton could have envisioned the death or capture of Navy SEALs not in terms of those men’s own horrible fates, but only as political “downside” for an equally narcissistic Barack Obama.

In Clinton’s defense, he spoke not just from his own selfish instinct to see presidential survival as more important than the fates of those who actually took the physical risk. Rather, a year ago Obama himself had already hijacked the mission with a flurry of self-referential pronouns: “Tonight, I can report . . . And so, shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken . . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as commander-in-chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed . . .”

As for the civilian responsibility for approving such hazardous missions for our intelligence and military communities, Obama has never confessed, then or now, that most of the anti-terrorism protocols that led to critical intelligence about the probable whereabouts of bin Laden had been strongly opposed by Obama himself. Indeed, almost every Bush-Cheney policy that President Obama eventually embraced — renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act — was opposed by Obama as a state legislator, a U.S. senator, and a presidential candidate. Apparently, there is no loudly announced “reset” when it comes to the war on terror.

…the latest triumphalism is a continuance of a long line of self-adulation that we have grown accustomed to in Barack Obama since he came to the public’s attention — the professor’s two memoirs without a single commensurate scholarly publication; the Latinate motto; the faux-Greek columns; the biblical quelling of the rising seas and cooling of the planet; the fallback retreat to the Victory Column when questions were raised about the appropriateness of the Brandenburg Gate as a venue for his speech; and so on. The common characteristics in Obama’s I/me/my career have been such rhetorical, visual, and symbolic efforts to mask an absence of accomplishment (e.g., why not even one Harvard Law Review article, or perhaps a single publication as a University of Chicago lecturer, or a successful program as a Chicago community organizer, or a signature piece of legislation as an Illinois legislator, or an acknowledged legislative record as a U.S. senator?).

IBD on Bill Clinton’s failure to deal with Al Qaeda and to kill Osama when he had the chance/s.

…Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who led the Osama bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999, and was Special Advisor to it from 2001 until he left the agency in 2004. He is the author of two books on the war on terror.

In a July 4, 2006, Op-Ed in the Washington Times, Scheuer dismisses former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s memoir on the hunt for bin Laden.

Speaking of “Mr. Clinton’s failure to capture or kill bin Laden on any of the eight to 10 chances afforded by CIA reporting, Mr. Clarke never mentions that President Bush had no chances to kill bin Laden before Sept. 11 and leaves readers with the false impression that he, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, did their best to end the bin Laden threat.”

That impression continued with Brian Williams’ fawning “Rock Center” report.

As Clinton guru Dick Morris relates, a first missed opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden came in February 1998, when “Clinton’s aides scuttled a CIA plot that had been eight months in the planning to kidnap Osama.”

The plan would have used Afghan tribesmen to capture the al-Qaida leader who would then have been brought to the U.S. for trial.

Another chance came on Aug. 20, 1998, in the famous “wag the dog” attack at the height of l’affaire Lewinsky, when cruise missiles were actually fired at a bin Laden encampment in Afghanistan.

Problem was, Clinton ordered that the Pakistanis be informed of the attack, lest they believed the cruise missile in their air space were fired by India, which didn’t have any cruise missiles.

The news, of course, was leaked and bin Laden fled.

Yet another missed opportunity came in May 1999 when the CIA reported that bin Laden would be in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for five days. As the 9/11 Commission report said: “If this intelligence was not ‘actionable,’ working-level officials said at the time and today, it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence could meet that standard.”

It was the Clinton administration that could have put Osama bin Laden out of commission before 9/11. It was under the Clinton administration that Americans were killed by terrorists on three continents without a meaningful response.

It was under Bill Clinton that we left Somalia in disgrace after dead Americans were dragged through the streets, giving Osama all the encouragement and proof of our lack of will he needed.

When Chelsea Clinton, with her, ahem, long record of accomplishment, offered her services to the TV networks, they all jumped at the chance.

BuzzFeed

To get the TV gig, Chelsea’s team played off rival networks, holding a series of meetings in New York last fall with all the major television news outlets, including ABC, CBS, and CNN. “Her agent calls, asks if you want to meet with Chelsea Clinton, you take the meeting,” one network executive tells BuzzFeed.

Team Chelsea. She has “people.” One wonders if she lives in a “compound” like the sainted Kennedy clan.

But she didn’t blow anyone away with her presence during the interview process, according to network executives who interviewed her. “Horrible,” says another high ranking TV executive who met with Chelsea. “There were ground rules, what she could and couldn’t report, only good news, no politics, ” says the executive, who felt Chelsea would be a dud and passed.

There was a sense in the meetings that that the news channels were auditioning for her — not the other way around — which rubbed a few of those she met with the wrong way. “They acted like we should be grateful” that she was offering herself to the networks, says the exec.

Even high ranking company officials within NBC, according to sources at 30 Rock, weren’t that impressed with her. One senior staffer told colleagues after multiple meetings that Chelsea was going to be simply “terrible” on television. Upon her arrival, Chelsea was given a welcome bag, filled with NBC swag, 30 Rockers tell me. NBC’s David Gregory responded by jokingly asking: “Where’s my welcome bag?”

Read it all. It explains a lot.

There is some nonsense, such as this:

Chelsea has, within her, one of the final untold chapters of the Clinton era scandals, a piece of ‘90s history that we already look back on with a mix of bewilderment, denial, and shame. (Did the political media class really spend the 90’s investigating a blowjob? Yep.)

Nope, the Clinton scandal was about a sitting president who suborned perjury and lied under oath.

Scooter Libby was ruined for supposedly lying to the FBI.

Martha Stewart did time in prison for supposedly lying to the FBI.

Roger Clemens is being tried for supposedly lying to Congress.

Bill Clinton was disbarred for his lawbreaking conduct.

If there was denial and shame, it all belongs to Slick Willie.

By Wesley Pruden

Good ol’ Bubba. He never disappoints. He’s always reaching for something new to feed his ravenous ego, now that age has withered, among other things, his ravenous libido.

He has persuaded the real-estate hustlers, small-town hucksters and dime-store merchants who mismanage things in Little Rock to rename the municipal airport to carry his name – and Miss Hillary’s, of course – unto the next millennium. Or at least until someone else runs things.

The Little Rock Airport Commission has been trying to clean up, or at least hide, scandal and mismanagement. Now the commission thinks it would be cool to erase the name of a hometown Air National Guard pilot killed in the line of duty, which has adorned the airport for 75 years, and replace it with the name of the nation’s most celebrated draft-dodger.

Adams Field would become the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, though neither Bonnie nor Clod is even from Little Rock. Hillary’s a yankee to boot. Capt. George Geyer Adams, the dumpee, was born into an old Little Rock family and was a National Guard pilot who died when a propeller exploded in his face. The airport was named to honor him on the eve of World War II, when sacrifice in arms was valued above all else, and celebrity was mere afterthought.

The press agent for the airport commission – Hillary was once the commission’s lawyer – insists that the idea “originated” with the commission, and only after that did the commission “reach out” to the Clintons on “appropriate naming options.” Nobody in Little Rock believes that. Bonnie and Clod have tried for years to get the airport named for one or (more…)

Media Myth Alert

ABC News offered yesterday a risible lineup of two-timing politicians that omitted Bill Clinton, the philandering 42nd president, but included Thomas Jefferson, about whom the evidence of sexual dalliance is thin at best.

ABC’s roster of “the top eight politicians who led double lives” was posted online and promised “a look at some … tawdry affairs and public scandals” — and how the politicians implicated “weathered the storm.”

In addition to Jefferson, ABC included Grover Cleveland, the U.S. president in the 1880s and 1890s who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Eliot Spitzer, who as governor of New York consorted with a high-priced call girl.

The ABC roster also included an obscure and mostly forgotten former politician, Vito Fossella, a five-term New York congressman who in 2008 acknowledged fathering a child in an extramarital affair.

Given that the likes of Fossella made the list, it’s inexplicable that Clinton was omitted.

Ask Juanita Broaddrick.

Meanwhile, Mark Levin has a suggestion for ABC News, if they really want to dig up old dirt.

“Mr. Producer, wake up Brian-what’s his name-Brian Ross again, ABC News, the senior investigative reporter.  Tell him to find out who Obama’s drug pusher was, would you please?  Oh, use this; say it’s an ex-drug pusher because he likes to look into things that begin with e-x, an ex-drug pusher.”

So Herman Cain was once accused of sexual harassment. Wagging tongues figure this could derail his candidacy.

For context, let’s consider Bill Clinton, well respected member of the Democrat party.

Gennifer Flowers

Paula Jones

Monica Lewinsky

Kathleen Willey

Juanita Broaddrick

Do you hear anyone on the Democrat side saying, “Oh, it’s just about sex”?

Imagine if Bush had said something similar.

A trip down memory lane. Here’s Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather’s pizza, contesting Bill Clinton on the cost of his (long since forgotten) healthcare plan.

What’s interesting is that Clinton seems so knowledgeable — just look at the impressed expression on the young woman’s face — until Cain speaks back.

You can also see Clinton’s brilliant political instincts kick in when he knows he’s lost an argument.

Slick Willie to the rescue:

“If they [the Republicans] said, look, that now is not the time for big tax increases to harm the recovery, they would be right,” Clinton told ABC News in an exclusive interview at the Clinton Global Initiative America conference in Chicago. “But it’s also right to say that now’s not the time for big spending cuts.

“What I’d like to see them do is agree on the outlines of a 10-year plan and agree not to start either the revenue hikes or the spending cuts until we’ve got this recovery underway,” Clinton added. “The confidence that the Republicans say would be given to investors with a budget plan, they’d get whether we started this year or next year or the year after that, for that matter.”

Charlie Brown never wised up about Lucy and the football.

Remember: promises Congress makes for future Congresses to keep are worthless.

Unfortunately, however, Clinton fears Republicans’ “ideological conviction” about never raising taxes recalls the lead-up to government shutdowns in the ’90s, adding that the pressure on GOP candidates to toe the ideological line could hamstring their bids to unseat President Obama.

Ideological conviction = principle. Clinton is an unprincipled man.

“They were in a similar anti-government fever, anti-tax fever in 1995 until, you know, the struggle went on for a year and they shut the government down twice,” Clinton said. “The public made a judgment that that was not right. And then we finally broke through. It wound up with the balanced budget act and forced surpluses and real prosperity.”