Why did the RW hate Clinton so much ?

This is a sincere question, I was tuned out of politics for most of the 90's. Clinton was hardly a flaming liberal.

And we all know how narrow that is

was running for the US Senate. Listening to his ads, which never mentioned his party affiliation, I thought he was the Republican candidate. His opponent, however, ran an endless series of attack ads calling him a "Hollywood liberal". I guess if you are far enough to the right, people like Kerrey and Kerry and Clinton and HR Clinton seem like flaming liberals.

a lather. But then again the hard core right wingers are irretrievably stupid - and proud of it.

He had run against RW'ers term after term beating them here. He'd exposed unethical (if not unlawful) dealings that made people like Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboy owner now) very rich at the expense of the citizens of Arkansas getting screwed by utility companies.

They hated Hillary in Arkansas already. Clinton already had the reputation of being a philanderer.

So the RW hate machine in Arkansas became the ground zero workings for the Richard Mellon-Scaife money to smear Clinton somehow, some way.

It was sheer hatred. Clinton already had that in Arkansas, either you loved him or you hated him, not much in between here. (R's hated and D's loved)

It was just a simple transition to make it national.

I mean, that's the major reason the 2000 election was "stealable" IMO.

people like him in spite of them. The R/W on the other hand show cases themselves as being church going-perfect human beings. Deep down people do not like phony behavior!

No one is phonier & has more flaws than this creep:

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

http://home.comcast.net/~wizardofwhimsy/

Unfortunately, it's no longer available there, but check out the others. He's got some doozies.

First, he was young. And a Democrat. And he came out of nowhere. And his daddy was a nobody and a drunk to boot. And his mother was kind of a floozy. And he got elected despite their best attempts to smear him with his infidelities. And his wife was a competent woman with a career of her own. And he came in at a time when the pendulum was swinging nicely to the right and he put a kink in that and they didn't like it.

Plus I think a lot of them honestly believed he and Hilary murdered people to get into power. Plus it was a well-known fact that she is a lesbian. Or so my 90-year old uncle told me. And his daughter told him, and she was an airline atttendant in the '70's, so of course she knew the truth.

Simple, really.

needed to attack any popular Democrat who was in power or had the potential to be in power. It all started with the "Contract on America" and Newt Gingrich.

and morons will hate anyone they're given permission to hate, every single damn time.

Clinton was seen as a spoiler who "cheated" Poppy out of his god ordained second term and a potential stop to the Reagan revolution of turning this country over to the riches 0.5% while suppressing wages, cutting benefits, killing unions, and generally making life utterly unlivable for everyone else.

That Clinton may have done the first but had no intention of doing the second was lost on them. The party bosses were a bunch of diapered two year olds, sitting and screaming "MINEMINEMINEMINE!!!!" as loud as they could, and when the tantrum didn't do it, they attacked via the Starr court.

I think historians will record the past 30 years or so as the most disgraceful in that party's history, with good reason.

I just want them GONE, out of power, all of them, and all their rotten antilabor policies of the last 37 years reversed.

To me, it was completely sour grapes over taking a 2nd term away from Bush Sr. They went completely frothing-at-the-mouth bonkers and did nothing but attack him from the second he won the election. After 6 years of relentless attacks where they dug into every detail of his public and private life, they eventually ambushed him into lying about a blowjob. The rest is history.

But the most important thing I take away from the 1992 campaign is that it was the only time in my memory that republican mudslinging didn't work. In fact, I remember it backfiring. So take heart, that shit doesn't always work.

1. the resentment at putting a "powerful" bush out of office
2. the small town politics of Arkansas was funneled into the national media and it appealed to lots of pinheads
3. the bushes did not want such low class people replacing them
4. the rw echo machine was developed during this time because of financial contributions from some really small minded, alcoholic, mean rich guys


One thing though - big business never took after Clinton. He still maintained popular support. His attackers were not many but well placed ane media savvy.

That's why 99% of them hated Clinton, anyway.

The real core reason is that he had the misfortune to be the president when the neoconservative movement (which is really only fueled by a tiny, very well funded group) was ready to seize power. They built a whole industry devoted to undermining that man and paving a road for their moronic, imperial puppet, GW Bush.

RWingers are jealous of those two qualities.

He gravitated toward policies that worked, rather than an ideology. Conservatives don't understand that concept and they didn't appreciate it when Clinton would adopt their policies. That made it harder for them to hate him, which in their beyond the looking glass world made them hate him even more.

Don't worry if you don't understand. Start to worry if you ever do understand.

He was trailer park trash who beat them all at their own game, getting
better grades, getting a smart, attractive wife, and beating the patrician
George Herbert Walker Bush to become the President.

He was "unentitled".

Tesha

clinton`s mom may have looked like "trailer trash" but she had more class than babs. clinton was raised right and george still has to have his diapers changed

Which undid 12 years of trying to find excuses to cut all spending on HHS. The uber rich SOBs have had to work SOOOO hard bankrupting America all over again so they can set out the elderly and poor to starve.

Clinton showed the nation could flourish instead of just the rich flourishing. THAT really pissed off the power elite who hired a lot of psy-ops types to create a 'common man revolt'. And there were no men so common as those who just loathed Bill and his talented wife but could never, ever answer the question: Why?

Plus - he was good at his job. The better he did, the more they hated him. How else can you explain fiscal conservatives being pissed at a guy who left a surplus for the first time in years and something their guys couldn't do.

"Trailer park trash who beat them at their own game"...what a great way of putting it!

He didn't deserve to be President since he came from humble background. He didn't have that elite, priviledged mindset and it scared them. Plus, the media were envious.

those who were in charge of GHWB's re-election campaign began noticing how charismatic Clinton was & that they should take heed; they viewed Clinton as a threat.

Their worst fears were realized when Clinton won, not once but twice, as president. And Clinton is still very popular, if not more now.

When the Repug talking heads get a hate on for someone, they make sure the non-thinking, quick-to-obey sheeple toe the line.

I don't think it goes much deeper than that.

instead of turning on him like a pack of rabid hyenas! But then as someone observed, he's a Southern white boy who ISN'T a racist or a bigot of any kind, so I guess that made the racists feel betrayed.

and no morality to stand on.

... have been/were being...

Rhodes scholar, incredibly intelligent, not racist ro sexist, AND STILL pure southern personality.

Southerners get a lot of sympathy from other "good whites" for their racist 'tudes because those "good whites" think that southern white folks "can't help it". This enables southern whites to continue in their evil ways.

Clinton "broke the southern white contract", by showing the world that southern white folks CAN be good people. Thus, Clinton left southern white folks hangning with no viable explanation for their evil ways.

So they hate him passionately.

They'd always been able to fall back on being 'Real 'Mer-kans, and Clinton took that away from them by being Southern, a bit folksy, but also liberal(ish).

They had a specific timetable for their evil plans and Clinton's election screwed that up.... They needed to vilify him in order to win back the Presidency so they could move forward. They used every method available: media, financial, legal (the Supremes) as well as stealing the election via election fraud in 2000 in order to ensure their success but a huge part of it also was the relentless smear campaign against Clinton that gave the country some serious scandal fatigue.

This whole past 5 years has seemed like a whirlwind of activity, compressed action on numerous fronts in order to move BFEE and PNAC forward.

I wonder if Clinton's presidency interrupted some longstanding plans which would have escalated their vitriol.

same people that got kicked out of office with Bush 1 are back again.

If he had been a Republican, none of what he did would have made the papers. Even
Bruce Bartlett admits the economy was better with Clinton. The Whitewater investigation
just concluded, it cost 70 million dollars, did they find anything substantial about
Clinton, No, it ended with a whimper. They investigated Clinton's Christmas cards for
140 hours and Abu Ghraib for 5 hours. That only should tell you something. Now there is
a whisper campaign about Sen. Clinton. One thing I know about her is that she is not
guilty of any malfeasance. Her and her husband are the most investigated people in the
history of this country.

Excellent Book: Vincent Bugliosi-No Island of Sanity- Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton:
The Supreme Court on Trial.

"...one would like to think that the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, is
the one island of sanity still remaining. But if what you folks are about to read is any
indication, we've all got a lot to worry about. The question that presents itself is whether the near-pathological dizziness and irrationality in our society has so invaded
this nation's marrow that, like a wildly infectious virus, even the Supreme Court is not
immune."

A) He was able to "triangulate" and integrate rightist planks into his own platform, therefore stealing thunder from the right (big mistake in the long term, but politically helpful to the Big Dog after the 1994 Repub takeover of the Legislative Branch).

B) He met their criteria for "far leftist." The right, since the early 90's, seems to think that anyone slightly more liberal than Torquemada is a pinko commie liberal. Beats me as to why they think demonizing half the population is a coherent political strategy, but there ya go (It DID work for a while; just goes to show you how easily intimidated many people are).

C) He was married to Hillary, who was somehow under the delusion that she was fully equal to men everywhere (uppity shrew!)

D) On the minus side, both Bill and Hillary are transparently ambitious. They are tragically obvious about their goals and this is resented by the right, who prefer leaders who act (falsely) as if they just woke up one day, tripped over a roller skate on the stairway, and, I dunno, just somehow accidentally ended up President of the United States. Some call it the "Aw, Shucks Factor;" Reagan and * had/have it in spades, and anyone who is not conciously a extremist right-winger with blinders on can see right through the act.

E) Waco. Koresh. However, had a republican president/attorney general ordered the Waco compound destroyed they would have had no problem with it.

F) His presidency was a speed bump in the road to permanent one-party rule.

G) The prosperity enjoyed during Clinton's two terms in office meant that there was enough money to fund social programs for the needy. This scared the right. Unfortunately, Clinton didn't outlay much money to said programs (in fact, with NAFTA and Welfare Reform, he screwed over a lot of working poor people), so their fear was mainly unfounded.

H) He represented "The Sixties" to them.

ON EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot the whole "list of murders" thing the right dreamed up about Clinton...supposedly he killed like forty people or something. With his bare hands. While worshipping Satan. And having sex. Lots and lots of sex. Uh...yah. And they think WE'RE nuts for believing there might possibly be some voter fraud going on....

so in 2000 they fixed the problem ,in 2004 they fixed the problem ,and in 2008 they will fix the election again. welcome to hell

they hate the 60s. in fact many of the current crop rwers are motivated by their experiences during that period. i seriously think that people like george will became cons because they couldn't get in on that free love stuff that was going around. the personal becomes the political.

on social issues - gays in the military, abortion rights, women's issues, etc.
It was on economic issues - NAFTA, MFN, oil exploration, balancing the budget, workfare, etc. that he was a moderate Republican and even there they produced increases in the minimum wage and the family and medical leave act and tax increases for the upper brackets and expansion of the EIC.

One of the main things was that he was a usurper who took what "rightfully" should have been Reagan's fourth term (GHWB's 2nd term).

But the press really savaged Carter too I think. He was treated the way Bush should have been - as a bumbling incompetent.

both of which are things RWers hate

for world domination.

Poppy Bush was supposed to get a second term and by then we would have been where we are now. Instead Clinton reversed the train wreck of the Reagan/Bush years giving us eight years of prosperity and peace.

They hate him for that and for making them look like the greedy old criminals that they are.

Why did/does the Right hate Bill Clinton? I would agree with the opinion of many that it is because he exemplifies everything they hated about the Sixties, when they were nerdy outcasts, who had no luck with women, and who rebelled in their own way by embracing extreme conservatism, in a liberal era, with a zealotry that knew no bounds. It was the revenge of nerds, who found themselves amassing power, and wanted it all. With Clinton's genius for politics, his ambition, and his intellect, he stood in their way. He, and his wife, whom they hate even more.

He had to be stopped. They have been on the march since Barry Goldwater pronounced extremism respectable, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated. LBJ sank himself. They sank Jimmy Carter, Al Gore (although, after he won the election of 2000, they could stop him only by order of a Supreme Court they by then controlled), and John Kerry -- using shameful Atwater/Rovian tactics, an endless supply of funds from eccentric right-wing billionaires and much of corporate America, and a cowardly and compliant news media.

A tawdry, private dalliance, and the lie that a minuscule financial deal amounted to a hill of beans, gave the Right the ammunition to assassinate, politically, Bill Clinton. Seeing him rise again, basking in rock-star popularity around the world, making millions, with Hillary Clinton a U.S. Senator, fuels their jealous contempt for him still. The nerd can take revenge, but never be exorcised.

It started on that grassy knoll in Dallas. I've been saying that for years.

If it hadn't been Bill Clinton it would have been Mario Cuomo or Paul Tsongas or any other Democrat who stood in the Repugnicans way to absolute greed and power.

This goes to the real "Raygun" revolution of the 80's...the change in attitude in this country that de-regulation and greed were good and the person with the most toys won. The golden rule became "ye who makes the gold, makes the rules". This also co-incided with the rise of the Southern Strategy that had transformed the Repugnicans that embraced the racists and segregationists who no longer felt welcome in the Democratic party. Call it "white flight", but the change on the Country Club GOOP into the NASCAR GOOP had begun.

By the early 90's, the Repugnicans had enjoyed 12 years of making money and manipulating laws and regulations...having the greatest power at their hands since the 20's. Decades of Roosevelt New Deal and Kennedy/Johnson Great Society legislation was either torn apart or demonized and the GOOP became more and more emboldened as they found new ways to win elections and further their profits and power.

Clinton was a symbol to be demonized as much as Gore was as was Kerry. Clinton stood in the way of the Repugnicans having the full control they so craved...but it also served as a benefit...Clinton hate could be molded into a unifying agent that tested well with the Repugnican base. The fact he not only was popular with blacks (Repugnican white flight) but also had a "feminazi" wife along with all the other Repugnican cartoon boogie men...Clinton made an ideal target. The fact he won made him a sitting target...one that could be constantly bashed; primarily to unite and raise billions in cash from Repugnican suckers...err donors.

Clinton hate never had a thing to do with politics. I will argue Clinton's fiscal policies were as pro-business as any Repugnican administration...leading to the Telcom disaster of '96...that in-turn has led to a corporate monopoly of the media. Inversely, Nixon oversaw the greatest expansion of social services under his administration. It's all "hardball"...and the result of a well orchestrated and funded Repugnican machine that took every advantage of a diverse and sleeping Democratic base that was easily coward into being defensive and reactive...an image that even Clinton couldn't overcome.

He was a personally flawed man, from the sticks, who protested against Vietnam, beat them at their own game. By 1992 the Republicans had come to belivee the Presidency was their personal fiefdom, and here came this extremely intelligent man who embodied everything they professed to hate.

And on top of that his political skills were unmatched by any Republican, and he was a highly successful President.

Even now when I ask my RW inlaw why he hates the Clintons he can't give me any substantial reason. He even starts spewing some nonsense about how they have had people murdered and the scary thing is I truly think he believes it. But I must say that I get the sense that Hilary is more of a threat to him than Bill was. Probably has something to do with the whole woman in power thing.

And Monica Lewinsky had more President in her than Bush ever will.

You may also want to read an excellent book, The Hunting of the President, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312273193/102-0361898-6718554?v=glance&n=283155

by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons.

or buy the DVD here (ironic it is a Fox movie) http://www.thehuntingofthepresident.com/

Either will explain the jealously and hatred of a country boy from outside of the machine getting to be President.

and Clinton postponed it for 8 years. Also, when he was Governor of Arkansas, he told the RWers in Washington he wasn't going to run and did. THEY-WERE-PISSED.

Bill played the game better than they did.

They immediately begin to passionately HATE any Democrat who dares run for national office.

Because Clinton renders fiscal conservatives obsolete.

All this started in 1932 with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This election ushered in the phenomenon known as the New Deal - the rise of Social Security, the eventual rise of Medicare, the development of dozens of other social programs, and the enshrinement of the basic idea that the Federal government in America can be a force for good within the populace. Even in 1932, such an idea was anathema to unrestricted free-market profiteers and powerful business interests, for the rise of a powerful Federal government also heralded the rise of regulation.

Within the ebb and drift of American politics, those who stood agains tthe concepts espoused by FDR and his adherents drifted inexorably into what is now the modern Republican Party. This drift was aided by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which motivated the last vestiges of the old, racist, Confederate Democratic Party to bolt to the right. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society plan further widened the rift, and the progressive activism in the 1960's and 1970's solidified the battle lines. Once the shift was completed, the stage was set for the kind of political to-the-knife trench warfare that has been happening to this day.

Many issues were bandied about in the no-man's land between the lines, but at the end of the day, the issue to be tested was that basic premise brought by FDR: What will the place of the Federal government be in the lives of the American people? Can that government be a help?

Those who argued against this idea had ample rationales for their resistance, some of them uncomfortable to hear in the light of day. The activism of the Federal government brought about racial desegregation and the rise of minority rights, something a segment of the right finds unacceptable to this day. The activism of the federal government made it difficult for unrestricted free-market loyalists to secure the privatization of available mass markets like health care, insurance and Social Security. The activism of the Federal government kept mega-businesses from the ability to grow to whatever size they pleased, even though such growth was death to the basic capitalist concept of competition. The activism of the Federal government forced these businesses to spend a portion of their profits on pollution controls. The list of complaints went on and on. In a corner of their hearts, many who stood against FDR's plans did so because the rise of an activist Federal government smelled a little too much like Soviet-style communism for comfort.

And so the trenches were dug, the bayonet?s were fixed, and the war dragged on and on. The right howled that such an activist government would require the American people to be taxed to death. The right howled that public schooling did not work, and they de-funded public education on the state and local levels to prove their point. The right invented bugaboos like the "welfare queen," with her Cadillac and ten children, who avoided working and lived of the sweat from the honest man's brow. Often, the American people listened to their arguments. The rise of Ronald Reagan is evidence that their message had strength, if not merit.

The problem, as ever, became clear before too long. Unrestricted free-marketeering, deficit spending, tax cuts for the richest people in the country which would purportedly cause the trickling down of monies to the rest, unrestricted polluting, unrestricted defense spending, and the deregulation of absolutely everything, is poison to any economy that is subjected to it. George Herbert Walker Bush was left holding this particular bag in 1992, and he was not enough of a salesman to convince the American people that it was still working.

This is when all hell really began to break loose.

Many people believe the statement that "Bill Clinton was the best Republican President we've ever had." There are a great many facts to back this assertion, but it begs the question: If Clinton was the best Republican President we've ever had, why did the Republicans work every night and every day for eight years, why do they continue to work to this day, to destroy him and the economic legacy he left behind?

The answer is complex. Clinton is labeled 'Republican' by the Left because of the passage of NAFTA, of GATT, of the Welfare Reform Act, of the Telecommunications Act, and for a variety of other reasons. In many ways, however, this does not tell the entire story. The passage of these rightist packages came, in no small part, because Clinton had no hard-core activated base pushing him in the proper direction. After twelve years of warfare against Reagan and Bush, a massive swath of the progressive community saw Clinton's victory in 1992 and felt like they had at last won the fight. They threw their activism into neutral, leaving Clinton with no army to back him up. One can hardly blame them for doing so after such a protracted struggle.

But this left Clinton exposed. The onslaughts of the right pushed him inexorably in their direction, because there was no powerful progressive network there to push back. Only after the impeachment mayhem broke loose did the tattered threads of progressive activism come back together again, but by then the damage had been done. Certainly, there were many progressives in America who fought the good fight every step of the way, but there were not enough of them. Progressives in 2003 who label Clinton as 'Republican' should take a long look in the mirror, and remember what they were not doing from 1993 to 1998, before casting final judgment. I am, sadly, one who has trouble facing that mirror.

An analysis of the facts, and the record, reveals Clinton to have been one of the most effective progressive Presidents in American history. By 1998 he had managed to create an economic system that filled the Federal treasury with unprecedented amounts of available money, and he had also managed to pass a variety of progressive social programs that benefited vast numbers of middle-class Americans. When Clinton stood up in 1998, with a massive budget surplus waiting in the wings, and cried, "Save Social Security first!" he was roaring a battle cry across the trenches that had been there since 1932. Such a surplus would fund social programs all across the country. Such a surplus would, at long last, settle the argument: An activist Federal government can be a force for good within the American populace, and once more, can be paid for with extra left over. The New Deal/Great Society wars seemed to be coming to an end.

This was why he had to be destroyed.

The rest is coda. The impeachment, funded by right-wing activists and business interests, stormed along by a mainstream media whose Reagan-era deregulated status led to a complete breakdown in journalistic ethics, and all buttressed by years of unsubstantiated scandals pushed along by congressional zealots with subpoena power, left the American population exhausted enough to vote against their own best interests in 2000. Too many didn't vote at all. The "Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!" drumbeat that lasted over 2,000 days drove the voters into thinking a change was required. Though Gore won the election, the margin of victory was small enough to be exposed to theft by a partisan Supreme Court which, by rights, should not have come within a country mile of touching that case. A corrupted news media, again, pushed the whole farce along.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/101003A.shtml

Look, in the Old Testament, the Israelites were always getting carted off to captivity by the invader of the year time after time. Rather than looking at real historical reasons for all of that, the Bible usually blames it on 'sin' and 'turning away from God,' and their being invaded, occupeid and carted away into slaver was just punishment. Therefore, they believed that what Clinton did, which in most rational people's minds wasn't that bad, would be cause for God to rain down retribution on the good old USA. Instead, we had one of the most prosperous decades in US, and maybe human history.

Suddenly, their Old Testament, biblical way of looking at politics was proven rather dated and inaccurate. We can't have that, now can we? I guess it is a measure of their faith that they are completely oblivious to what a fustercluck their good, 'Christianized' fundie government is.

and because Hillary called them on it.

:headbang:
rocknation

And he wasn't one of them.

He stole at least half their issues and made them his own, ESPECIALLY fiscal responsibility!

an elderly man whose politics were mostly radical (he corresponded with Noam Chomsky), but whose social background was Southern aristocrat.

He considered Clinton "an upstart cracker."

Given the largely Southern leadership of the current Republican party, I wonder if that isn't a lot of it.

White men who grow up in poverty in Arkansas aren't supposed to win Rhodes Scholarships, go to law school, AND be Democrats.