Both Former President Bill Clinton and Future President Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham whined mightily this week that members of the Bush Administration were blaming the Clintons for the spate of corporate cheating which has come to light since the first of the year.
Let's review the evidence:
From the Transcript of the President's news conference on July 8, 2002, the day before his Wall Street speech on corporate responsibility:
Question: Sir, you said [that] in your speech tomorrow you're going to talk about some of the excesses of the 1990s, when a lot of money was flying around, people were playing a lot of games with money.
THE PRESIDENT: That's right.
Question: You weren't President then; Bill Clinton was President. Do you think in some way he contributed to that, set a moral tone in any way?
THE PRESIDENT: No.
Well, sure. Bill would consider that a slam because we know how closely he has defined two-letter words in the past. It depends on what your definition of "no" is. Let's go on:
From the transcript of the ceremony to sign the Sarbanes Oxley Corporate Responsibility Act of 2002 yesterday:
I commend the Congress for passing a strong set of reforms. I particularly thank Senator Paul Sarbanes and
Congressman Mike Oxley. Both are very thoughtful, and were persistent voices for reform. They are true advocates of
corporate integrity. I appreciate their working together to send a signal to the rest of the country that it's possible
in Washington, D.C. to set aside partisan differences and to do what's right for the American people.
I also appreciate the bipartisan leadership in the Congress, and I particularly thank Senator Daschle and Senator Lott who are with us
here today.
Well, now, right there. That business about setting aside partisan differences, I can see how the Clinton-Rodhams might consider that a vicious attack on the way they handled difficult issues during their eight years in the White House.
From an AP report of an interview by Bill Clinton on a Washington, DC television station:
"There was corporate malfeasance both before we took office and after ... The difference is I actually tried to do something about it, and their party stopped it" in Congress.
As an aside, that AP story was headlined: "Clinton Rips Bush on 90's Fraud."
I know we went over this material earlier this week, but for the purposes of class review:
When was George W. Bush Inaugurated?
The AP is conceding that this fraud began, when?
Who was President for the vast majority of the 90's?
Mrs. Rodham-Clinton-Rodham said in a speech in New York that "all the arrows were pointing up" when they were in office.
Notwithstanding the folly of using up or down arrow metaphors to describe ANYTHING dealing with the Clinton years, Democrats have been braying for the past month that everything that was good about the U.S. Economy during the Clinton Administration was completely and exclusively - without any help from any other person or group - to the credit of Bill (and now Hillary) Clinton.
But, anything which went wrong, was because those bad, bad people up there on Capitol Hill wouldn't give poor Bill what he wanted. Can't even blame it on Gingrich, because he wasn't there for the last two years.
It must have been Dennis Hastert's fault. Yes. That's it. That ogre.
Here's a little secret. As these cases have been examined more closely - both by the government and by the corporations themselves - it is clear that this skullduggery began in 1999. Why? Because many of those wonderful upward pointing arrows were based on nothing. Air. Fluff. A gigantic Ponzi scheme.
The arrows in question, actually, began pointing down after March 10, 2000 - 2000 - when the tech bubble burst and the Nasdaq average began its nosedive.
Because so much dot-com activity was totally dependent on the value of an individual corporation's stock, some executives decided they had to cheat to maintain their stock price - to keep the arrow pointing up.
And they started cheating in 1999. Right under the collective noses of the Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham-Clinton-Rodham Administration.
Imagine that. Imagine that.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: links to the transcript of that press conference, a short discussion of Speaker Hastert, the definition of a "Ponzi scheme," the Battleground poll and a recipe for duck a l'orange; a photo of the Mullmeister & Tony Snow, AND the usual things.
If you are working at a lobbying firm, a government affairs office, a coalition, or a PAC you should take a
look at this page to see how advertising in Mullings might serve your organization very well:
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