I think the one question I've seen posted most frequently that I've yet to address is why we (meaning dittiots) hated the Clinton's so much. This'll have to be a two-parter. Let's start with Bill. At first glance you might think we hated him because he avoided Vietnam and did drugs as a youngster. Both are good reasons, but if that were true then we never would have elected `W'...unless we were hypocrites...
whole other can of worms there.
So what was it in particular about Mr. William Jefferson Blythe Clinton that drove us so buggy? Why were Congressional Republicans willing to throw away everything just so they could put a figurative DNA stain on the equally figurative blue dress that is Clinton's legacy? What do I, a former dittohead, still find myself believing about the Clinton's? The answers may surprise you. They probably won't, but they might.
In the interest of full and fair disclosure, my first impressions of President Clinton came when he was the governor of my then home state of Arkansas. I lived in Little Rock from '83 to '85, and Governor Clinton's escapades were the stuff of rumors even in my 6th and 7th grade classrooms. Remember, when you live in Arkansas there ain't a whole Hell of a lot else to do. Eat at Shorty Smalls over on Rodney Parham, hit the Putt-Putt by the interstate, gossip about the Clinton's, and call it a night.
Flash forward to '92, and we laughed when we heard Bill Clinton was going to run against George Sr. Not only did Bush have an approval rating in the low 90s, but also we knew Clinton's sexual mores and draft dodging would come back to haunt him. We sort of felt sorry for Bill. He had no chance.
As you can see, I came into the '92 election with a somewhat skewed perspective. Bush 41 was a war hero; Clinton avoided Vietnam. Bush 41 had Purple Hearts; Clinton wouldn't answer questions about drug use in his past. It was, in short, a choice between a man who served his country with distinction, and some yokel whose youthful indiscretions should safely have kept him out of office.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
-Mark Twain
If you're a Republican you know that there are two reasons why Clinton got elected. The first and biggest reason--Bush raised taxes. By breaking that sacred trust with the Republican base, Bush allowed the creation of the second reason why Clinton won--Ross Perot. As a dittohead you know that any time you lose, it's not because of the issues. If people only understood the issues they'd be Republican. No, the only answer was Bush did him self in, and Perot contributed.
Even though Clinton won by an electoral landslide, we would console ourselves with the fact that Clinton didn't win a majority of the popular vote. In fact, most people voted against Clinton, not for him. He had no mandate.
Sound familiar? Having witnessed these elections from both sides now I have to say history is starting to rhyme in iambic pentameter.
It's important to note that at this point I didn't hate Clinton. I saw him being interviewed by Brokaw or Jennings in jeans the night before his inauguration, and I thought "this guy's pretty cool." I felt like we'd be in pretty good hands, even though I disagreed with him politically.
Then came October 3, 1993. Dateline: Somalia. Eighteen U.S. Rangers dead, dozens wounded. Images of our boys being dragged through the streets. We knew who to blame...
[Bush, right!? I mean, Operation: Restore Hope was something he did running out the door in December of 1992! Seems like Bush is getting away with one here, dropping 25,000 troops into a political nightmare with no clear definition of victory, no exit strategy, and very little operational guidance as to what we're supposed to do to help. That's a pretty big matzo ball to leaving hanging over the `big chair' in the Oval Office, no?
So Clinton inherits a situation where if he stays he's getting involved in particularly messy civil war, but if he leaves it looks as though he doesn't care. What can he do? It's like the Captain of the Titanic just handed him the hat and the wheel and said, "Good luck with this. Remember, whatever happens, it's your fault."]
...we blamed Clinton. Clinton left those boys to die because he hated the military. He had to hate the military because he avoided it. In fact, Democrats have always hated the military. Just like they did in Vietnam.
[As a dittohead you believe that Democrats were protesting the Vietnam War because they hated the military, not because the war was unjust, or being fought over people who could give a damn, or a waste of our time, money, resources, and most importantly our blood. It was about Democrats (or as Rush calls them "long-haired, dope smoking, maggot-infested hippie types") hating the military and everything it stands for. I fully expect Ann Coulter to write a book about how we would have won the Vietnam War were it not for Democrats.]
This was the actual genesis of my sig. With Clinton it was all fun and games until October 3rd, when as a dittohead you firmly believed he wanted the military to fail. And with Rush's help it's a short journey to saying Clinton wanted the troops to die.
After that, hating Clinton is a cakewalk--from Gennifer Flowers to Whitewater to commodities trading to Vince Foster to Paula Jones to Monica. Clinton is guilty of everything he's accused of regardless of the facts. You can't get the facts, that's the problem! The liberal media wants to push its own agenda, not give you the facts.
Case in point: I was talking to my friend Chris about this last night, and I remembered Vince Foster. Even up until last night here's what I believed (or remembered believing) about the Foster suicide: Vince was having an affair with Hillary, wrote a suicide note giving a full confession, and killed himself in his office. He was discovered not in his office, but in a park across the street. The suicide note was never found.
I have deliberately avoided looking this up on the internet. I wanted my recollection to be as free from influence as I could get it. As I type these words I remember the facts of Vince Foster's death to be that he killed himself in his office, but was found in a park. No one knows how he got there. If I were to look up the story in Time magazine's archives, that's how I expect it would be summarized.
And that's what you're up against when you're dealing with dittiots. This stuff gets so ingrained in your psyche that, even when you come to your senses, there's still some stuff in there that you can't get out. Or that you forgot was still in there. You're going to hear a lot more of that when I talk about Hillary. To come completely correct: I still don't like Hillary. But that's another story for another day.
But the answer as to why we hated Clinton so much, for me, came down to that one day in October. The president showed that he didn't give a damn about the military (he actually wanted them to die), and left them without enough troops to get the job done. How could he even know how to get the job done? He avoided service in Vietnam! And what did we really expect when we elected as President a man who experimented with drugs when he was younger?
History is starting to sound more like a dirty limerick.