{"id":753,"date":"2003-10-15T12:48:27","date_gmt":"2003-10-15T17:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/753.html"},"modified":"2003-10-15T12:48:27","modified_gmt":"2003-10-15T17:48:27","slug":"rich-lowry-tries-to-smear-clinton-accidentally-praises-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/rich-lowry-tries-to-smear-clinton-accidentally-praises-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Rich Lowry tries to smear Clinton, accidentally praises him"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw (via Tapped<\/a>) that National Review’s Rich Lowry has bottled up all of his hatred of Bill Clinton and bound it together in one handy-dandy new book, Legacy: Paying the Price of the Clinton Years.<\/p>\n

After I stopped chuckling over the title (how does a nation “pay a price” for unprecedented peace and prosperity?), I did some follow-up to see what Lowry was up to.<\/p>\n

Lowry explains in a National Review column<\/a> published yesterday that he spoke to “a couple dozen former Clinton officials” to see what kind of dirt he could dig up on the former president for his book. From the looks of things, he didn’t get much.<\/p>\n

Sure, Lowry got a few people to say, on the record, that they disapproved of Clinton’s Lewinsky behavior. No big shock there; few were bold enough to defend his personal mistakes in this area. And I suppose Lowry thought it was some kind of coup to get Dick Morris to say nasty things about Bill, but no one should seriously find this newsworthy.<\/p>\n

That being said, some of his favorite anecdotes from Clinton staffers are unusually weak and do little to actually bolster his case against the former president.
\n
\nFor example, Lowry quotes former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis as saying that Democrats “abused…the scandal machinery” of American politics in the 1980s. Why is this damning evidence against Clinton, who wasn’t elected until 1992? Lowry doesn’t say.<\/p>\n

Lowry quotes Clinton’s United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as saying that many Clinton aides were “overwhelmed” and intimated by Colin Powell. Again, I don’t see how this reflects poorly on Clinton personally.<\/p>\n

Best of all, Lowry includes a quote from Howard Paster, a Clinton congressional lobbyist, who is quoted as saying, “I don’t think the decisions were consistently ideological, because there were different players in every decision.”<\/p>\n

Now I don’t know about you, but isn’t it a good thing<\/i> that Clinton’s decision making wasn’t driven by ideology? Lowry includes this quote as if it were proof of yet another Clinton flaw, but it strikes me as a strength. The president heard from different people who came to different conclusions on a given matter and then reached a decision in a non-ideological manner.<\/p>\n

This, in contrast to Bush, who hasn’t the curiosity or the inclination to hear opposing view points on his preconceived (and usually wrong) ideas.<\/p>\n

After going over some of Lowry’s “evidence” against Clinton, I’m left agreeing with Kevin Drum’s conclusion<\/a>: “[I]f these quotes are the worst Lowry could dredge up, Clinton’s people must have liked him a lot.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw (via Tapped) that National Review’s Rich Lowry has bottled up all of his hatred of Bill Clinton and bound it together in one handy-dandy new book, Legacy: Paying the Price of the Clinton Years. After I stopped chuckling over the title (how does a nation “pay a price” for unprecedented peace and prosperity?), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}