Republicans just love Bill Clinton

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/republicans-just-love-bill-clinton-vr6pasv-168979066.html

Republicans just love Bill Clinton
By Dick Polman, Philadelphia Inquirer

... Orwell spins, and the mind reels. Isn't this the same Bill Clinton the Republicans impeached in 1998, wasting a year of America's time because the guy had lied under oath about sex? Their moral crusade prompted a substantial majority of Americans to side with Clinton.

Let's revisit the '90s - the actual '90s, not the alternative-reality '90s the GOP is determined to dwell in - and take a look at what Republicans were actually saying and doing while the Big Dog had the big job. As I well recall, the GOP was not trying then to depict Clinton as a combination of Cicero and Pericles. Quite the contrary: It viewed him as an illegitimate president by dint of his victory with only 43% of the vote in the three-way election of 1992.

Then came the really fun stuff. GOP-friendly media, led by Rush Limbaugh, the National Review, and the American Spectator, attacked Hillary Clinton so relentlessly that a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote that their antipathy suggested "a need for psychological help." Bill, meanwhile, was accused of ordering the deaths of several associates (the Rev. Jerry Falwell distributed a video featuring a "Clinton body count&quot and smuggling drugs through an Arkansas airport...

It's amusing now to hear Team Romney praise Clinton as someone who "worked with Republicans," because the truth is that, at a pivotal juncture in 1993, they refused to work with him. Clinton was determined to mop up the red ink that had been bequeathed to him by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. So he pushed for an ambitious budget reconciliation package that would slash the deficit, in part by raising taxes on the richest Americans. Care to guess how many House and Senate Republicans worked with Clinton on this budget package and voted for it in the end? The answer is none.