Wednesday, October 8, 2014

BloggeRhythms

Former defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, have released memoirs detailing frustrations with the incumbent’s foreign policy and management style. Panetta has particularly criticized him in several interviews since his book, “Worthy Fights,” came out this week.
 
Although it’s odd for former associates to level criticism while a president is still in office, now another has joined the growing group of those believing the incumbent’s performance is lacking for someone holding the office of POTUS. 
 
Jonathan Topaz wrote in www.politico.com yesterday that, “former President Jimmy Carter is criticizing President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, saying he has shifting policies and waited too long to take action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
 
In an interview published Tuesday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 39th president said the Obama administration, by not acting sooner, allowed ISIL to build up its strength.
 
“[W]e waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said, using an alternate name for the terrorist group. “Then when [ISIL] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”
 
While Robert Gates and Jimmy Carter may simply be expressing significant concerns they have over the incumbent’s abilities and are showing that frustration in their scathing comments, it’s also very likely that Mr. Panetta is also trying to help Bill Clinton’s wife in her goal of trying to win the next presidency of the U.S. However, while that election’s two years away, that possibility is already bringing opposition out of the woodwork, although Bill’s wife hasn’t even announced her candidacy yet.
 
Michael Isikoff, of Yahoo News via Drudge, writes today that Robert Fiske, a former U.S. attorney who served as the original independent counsel in charge of the Whitewater investigation to probe the financial dealings of Bill and Hillary Clinton “says he was poised to bring high-profile indictments against top Arkansas political and business figures — based in part on testimony from a chief witness against the then president — when he was abruptly replaced by a panel of federal judges, throwing his investigation into turmoil.”
 
In a forthcoming memoir, "Prosecutor Defender Counselor," Mr. Fiske writes that, "I was angry, frustrated and above all disappointed that I was not going to be able to carry through and finish bringing the indictments. And while he offers no judgments on the conduct of the Clintons, nor on that of the man who replaced him, Kenneth Starr, he offers a more complicated picture, describing how he had quickly uncovered "serious crimes" in the Whitewater investigation but that his probe was cut short after conservatives falsely accused him of a "cover up." 
 
While there was never any evidence sufficient to link the Clintons to any of it, “there were certainly serious crimes." And, by the summer of 1994, Fiske says, he was preparing to bring eight indictments against 11 defendants, including criminal charges for fraud against Jim and Susan McDougal (the Clintons' Whitewater business partners), Webster Hubbell (then an associate attorney general and formerly Hillary Clinton's law partner) and Jim Guy Tucker (Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas).”
 
Furthermore, “A key witness in these cases was David Hale, a former municipal judge and the owner of a federally subsidized small-business lending company. It was Hale who had made the most serious allegation against Bill Clinton: Hale had claimed that Clinton, while Arkansas governor, had pressured him to make a fraudulent $300,000 federally backed loan to a marketing company owned by Susan McDougal that was really intended to pay off the two couples' debts in their Whitewater real estate investment. ("My name can't show up on this," Hale claimed Clinton had told him, an account that President Clinton later denied.) 
 
In August 1994, just as his investigation in Arkansas was gathering steam, Fiske was jolted when a panel of three federal judges — two of them strong conservatives — removed him on the grounds that he was not independent enough (because he had been appointed by Clinton's attorney general) and replaced him with Starr.”
 
The preceding items important because although Bill’s wife hasn’t even announced her presidential candidacy yet, stories both pro and con are starting to surface already. And since so many negative situations will eventually be dragged up again, the road ahead for the Clinton’s is going to be a very rough one. 
 
However, while her own problems and shortcomings may be extremely difficult, if not impossible to overcome, the current incumbent’s performance record may set the whole Democrat party back so far, Bill’s wife may have no chance of winning anyway, regardless.
 
That’s it for today folks.
 
Adios

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