Or: Why Bill Clinton has ruined America and all negative conditions in domestic policy or foreign policy are all his fault

Well, not really. The argument that Bill Clinton's administration is the cause of all that is bad about the world today has come into common use on both internet message boards and typical political rhetoric on the right. Conservative politicians, especially Republicans, attribute any economic woes, foreign policy snafus, awful conditions at all on the political scene in the United States today, to Bill Clinton. Why? Because he lied!

If you aren't finding this logic jarring, you probably have a talk show on AM radio in the Midwest. I'm not saying that Bill Clinton smells of roses and his policies and actions don't have an effect on the state of the world. The Clinton administration has its failings, both in domestic policy and abroad, but not to the extent that Republicans are wont to claim. The claim is, if you'll accept my sudden pop-psychology, a denial on the part of conservatives of the failings of conservative policy. They can't say that they are wrong, so they blame the nearest major democratic administration. The problem is they can't understand why things aren't going, in the words of Anne Coulter, "swimmingly." So the blame ends up coming to rest on old Bill's shoulders. Part of it is that Republicans hated Bill Clinton as much as Democrats hate George II and that hatred is all that they can muster as a political argument against people criticizing their favorite president ever.

This brain bug in the Republican party has made it fashionable to Clinton bash 6 YEARS after his administration left power. So fashionable that even Bush's rivals in the party have started using the line to drum up support. John McCain, for instance, recently accused the Clinton administration for failing to stop North Korea's development of nuclear weapons. This is mostly just some election season waxing, but it speaks of a trend within the GOP to look at current situations and feel that blame needs to be assigned. It isn't necessarily even Bush's fault that North Korea has a nuclear weapons program. But the hypocrisy of blaming someone for the state of the world for fourteen years when they can only ever really be held partially culpable for a small fraction of that time is too much to bear out under logic.

The US government is not the endeavor of a single person, it is a collection of all three branches of that government. The power of the Presidency has increased greatly since the start of this nation, but the entirety of our policies and activities are the collective endeavor of every department and section within the Federal government. Bill Clinton had as big a hand in creating the current state of affairs as the Congress with which he served. This is generally true with any presidency, though the current one is a special case.

The Bush administration has a special place in history as being an administration whose party has majority control over Congress and the Supreme Court. It means that the Republican party is a partially limited hegemonic force, it can pat its own back and it only has itself to answer to. So when the shit hits the diffusion pump and a scapegoat is needed, Bill Clinton gets called back into kicking service.

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