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Clinton In A Bubble
Media protecting its favorite president…
[by Roger Aronoff] 1/6/06

Clinton is the one in the bubble, which protects him from any hard questions from the media about his outrageous claims and conduct.

While Time and Newsweek examine the supposed phenomenon of an isolated President Bush in a bubble, another Clinton scandal is waiting in the wings to be discovered by the media. This one could sink Hillary's presidential prospects.

We at Accuracy in Media have long maintained that former President Bill Clinton should have withdrawn from the public scene after he left office, having been impeached for lying and scandalizing the oval office. But he continues to trot around the country and the globe, as if he is someone to be listened to or even adored. Clinton is the one in the bubble, which protects him from any hard questions from the media about his outrageous claims and conduct.

Shielded by an adoring media that he can always depend on, Clinton is raking in cash faster than he can count it, taking in nearly $10 million in 2003, giving speeches for up to $400,000 a piece. Most recently, he told the U.N.'s climate conference in Montreal, Canada that President Bush is "flat wrong" to reject the Kyoto treaty, which calls on the U.S. to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gasses to seven percent below 1990 levels. That would be approximately a 30 percent decrease below anticipated emissions by 2012.

In 1997, Clinton and vice president Al Gore, a believer in the earth spirit, were deeply involved in promoting the Kyoto treaty. Unlike the Internet, it appears that Gore actually can claim some credit for taking "the initiative in creating" the Kyoto treaty. But the Senate wouldn't even consider ratifying it. They voted 95-0 against its provisions, saying the treaty would "result in serious harm to the economy of the United States."

But in Montreal, Clinton made the dubious claim that "we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies." Besides being bad form to criticize a sitting president while in a foreign country, he seems not to have noticed that Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair recognizes that Kyoto is dead, that no country is going to cut its growth, and that the answer to reducing so-called greenhouse gases, if that is the course that is scientifically justified, lies in technological breakthroughs that won't damage our economy.

Clinton's pro-Kyoto comments weren't as bad as Clinton going to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and telling a group of students that the war in Iraq was "a big mistake." That was a major gaffe, ignored by the media, because the Clinton administration had indicted Osama bin Laden in 1998 because, among other things, "Al Qaida reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq." As he ordered the bombing of Iraq in December of 1998, Clinton insisted that "Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors." Just a couple months before he had signed the Iraq Liberation Act, calling for regime change—he is on shaky ground in condemning this war as a "big mistake."

Members of the Clinton Administration want us to forget those facts. When former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on Meet the Press on December 11, she told Tim Russert that "…as the intelligence has shown, there has been no connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, until recently when, as a result of even what Porter Goss is saying, there are more terrorists in Iraq than there were before." Russert wasn't prepared to ask her about her administration's indictment of bin Laden.

And while the media rarely point any of this out, they are largely ignoring another huge embarrassment to the Clintons, the Barrett Report. It is a 400-page report by independent counsel David Barrett, who started out in 1995 looking into whether or not former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros committed tax fraud when trying to cover up payments to his mistress. The investigation evolved into something quite extraordinary. And it has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media, leaving the reporting mainly to conservatives Byron York of National Review and columnist Tony Snow.

It has turned into potentially a huge scandal. In a recent column by Tony Snow, he writes that the 400-page report "is a bombshell, capable possibly of wiping out Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects." He says Barrett "found unsettling evidence that Justice Department officials were actively interfering with the probe and even conducting surveillance of Barrett and his office."

Now, through delays and congressional maneuvering detailed in Snow's column, the report, which under law is supposed to be made public, might not be revealed. We have not found a single story on this in the mainstream media, once again demonstrating the lack of interest in stories that expose Clinton hypocrisy or corruption.

Whatever happened to the public's right to know? -one-

copyright 2006 Accuracy in Media

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