926140: Congratulations! Your angry little rant wins a prize for factual mistakes, and specious fantasyland conclusions, let alone conveniently (or ignorantly!) rewriting history. Sorry, as the great, now deceased Democrat Senator D.P. Moynihan observed, "you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are NOT entitled to your own facts!"
Your angry twaddle makes the "fundies" you like to ridicule seem supremely learned and scholarly by comparison.
1. The 1st WTC bombing occurred about a month into the Clinton administration, which does NOT mean he's to blame.
What he IS to blame for, is the atrocious response, which characterized his administration's naive approach (or lack thereof) to terrorism against us for the next 8 years.
Libs like to brag that Clinton/Reno "unlike Bush, actually succeeded in bringing the perpetrator to Justice." Yes, Ramsi Yousef (in the US courtesy of an Iraqi passport, by the way) was eventually caught, tried, and sits in a cell.
BUT, by naively treating the whole thing as just another LAW ENFORCEMENT matter, (as opposed to an act of terrorism/war) Clinton/Reno fought back with an army of lawyers with briefcases, ensuring that Yousef would be tried in Federal Criminal Court, which ultimately led to prosecutors being REQUIRED to turn over EXTREMELY SENSITIVE intelligence data to the Defense attorneys (and Yousef himself) due to US jurisprudence discovery rules , Yousef transmits back information to his bad dude middle eastern buddies, ALERTING BIN LADEN FOR THE FIRST TIME, that in a big surprise to him, the NSA had been tracking his cell phone calls for months. With the long delays in the case having this actually happen about a year or so before Clinton's second term ended,
THANKS TO CLINTON/RENO's naive handling of this, several months before 9/11, a now alerted Bin Laden's cell phone calls went silent, and then later there was this sunny beautiful Tuesday morning in September.
Clinton's response with "black hawk down" was abysmal, which proved to have Bin Laden's fingerprints all over it.
Ditto the Khobar towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. You remember that one, right? Our soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia as part of the necessary post Gulf War 1 "we can contain Saddam" bit.
Well, "containing Saddam" cost us lives of many honorable servicemen, AND gave Bin Laden his Holy Jihad reason to hate America, and foment Al Qaeda to "drive the infidel out of our holy lands." And, he publicly declared WAR on America early into the Clinton administration.
After all of this, when Sudan, which had Bin Laden in custody, offered through quiet diplomatic channels to turn him over to US custody in 1996, in return for thawed political/economic relations with the US,
all Clinton/Berger/Albright could do was hem and haw, then lamely do nothing on the flimsy statement that "we didn't have any legal basis to take him."
But, of course, Clinton/Reno didn't have any trouble finding some "legal basis" to storm into a private residence at dawn, point submachine guns in small boy Elian Gonzales face, and FORCE him back to Cuba, to keep old Cigar Beardie satisfied.
On more than one occasion, the capable people in the intelligence ops, in cooperation with military units poised and ready, were ready to take out Bin Laden in minutes, only needing the OK from the President. But Clinton didn't want to be bothered while watching a golf tournament until it was too late, or Berger was too slow in communicating and vacillating with the President, because what always mattered most is worrying about what the "cultured" Europeans might think.
1998 Kenya/Tanzania embassy bombings no response
2000 USS Cole bombing no response
Yes, the then new Bush administration was aware that something might happen, but no idea really where and when (PRECISELY speaking) Yes, Bush got the August 6, 2001 daily brief that "Bin Laden determined to strike within the USA," but what PRECISELY do you do with that? As one author put it, it's as specific as announcing that "there's a waitress in LA determined to eventually break into an acting career."
Why do you think Berger risked his neck to STEAL ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS with his own handwritten comments vetoing any actions against Bin Laden (which were not present on the multiple COPIES of those documents)?
2. Franklin Raines, CEO of Fannie Mae, resigned under pressure AFTER BUSH HAD ALREADY BEEN RE-ELECTED to a 2nd term, not "fired right after Bush took office," and not because of "refusing to authorize subprime loans."
Raines was found to have enabled MAJOR ACCOUNTING FRAUD which allowed them to cook the books into looking profitable, allowing Raines and cronies to declare themselves multimillion dollar bonuses, when in reality the finances were increasingly shaky.
Raines and his democrat cronies basically did another ENRON, engineered themselves huge sums of money under fraudulent circumstances, and deceiving everybody (until it caught up to them!) about how much financial trouble the entity was really in. Raines walked away with $90 million, Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick walked away with some $28 million, etc. etc. And as part of a ridiculously lenient plea agreement, were allowed to get off with returning only the tiny sum (by comparison) of 3 million.
Whether the Bush administration did enough whistle/alarm blowing loud enough and soon enough is a very debatable question. But, Bush's treasury secretary and others testified on the Hill on many occasions from the 1st year Bush was in office until the present, warning of their concerns about Fannie's shaky financials and increasing risk of later disaster, only to get SCOLDED, SHOUTED DOWN, LECTURED TO AS RACISTS, who supposedly don't want others to share the American dream, etc. by Dodd, Frank, Maxine Waters, etc. When McCain called for a full Senate investigation and floor discussion over the impending dangers of Fannie in 2005, EVERY Senate DEMOCRAT on the committee (Dodd, Clinton, Schumer, etc.) used the Senate's quirky rules to kill any possibility of that.
The subprime mess began under Carter, with the CRA act, requiring banks to make shakier housing loans if they wanted to open branches in certain locations. Bad idea, but this GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION/COERCION didn't hit full steam until the mid l990's, when President Clinton ORDERED Robert Rubin to have the Reno Justice department threaten banks with major pain if they didn't significantly ramp up such shaky loan underwritings. Obama was an attorney for ACORN that sued and pressured banks to write bad loans.
Banks, that originally did this ONLY DUE TO GOVERNMENT COERCION, later were relieved to unload much of this worthless paper in packaged investment bundles to Wall Street and foreign investors and Fannie, etc. Wall street was happy to do what they do, buy and sell, etc. largely because of GOVERNMENT ENABLING at the other end, that guaranteed government backing in case of trouble, someday, etc. So, trouble crashed in rapid fashion last year.
Yes, certain individuals in the middle of this reality they didn't create, made profits, etc. but GOVERNMENT COERCION STARTED IT, and GOVERNMENT ENABLING on the opposite end allowed it to grow into the giant disaster it became.
This often repeated nonsense about "Republican deregulation" is a nice delusional, revisionist history myth.
Democrat/Socialist GOVERNMENT REGULATION/Interference started it under CARTER, CLINTON/RUBIN/RENO kicked it into high gear with Justice Department threats and intimidation, Democrat Fannie CEO Raines and his cronies cooked the books that enriched themselves while fraudulently mis-stating the true financials, which allowed the growing monster extra years to grown larger and then crash bigger, DESPITE REPUBLICAN attempts (ignored and shouted down) to get better OVERSIGHT and CONTROLS of this GOVERNMENT entity that Crooked, Greedy democrats were using to enrich themselves with cooked books, (fannie mae) and finally all of this government created and government enabled disaster brings us all down.
Sorry, your little bit of total fiction belies lots of passion and a near zero's worth of validity and real thinking.
As for the price of gas thing, I won't bother to address your lopsided conclusions there, but suffice it to say that the oil companies are neither all good, or all bad, and the speculators were indeed a major part of the problem (not all of which is subject to US jurisdiction) and you won't get any argument from me that they probably have too much influence. But speculators don't bid up or down the price of commodities solely on the basis of what happened today. Much of it is a bet on what they see happening months in the future. When there was (for good reason!) a growing chorus of americans demanding we start back reasonable drilling efforts for our own resources, and Bush announced an end to the ban on offshore drilling, should it be a surprise that speculators, now sensing that America might actually break out of its own studpidity and self paralysis, and start steps to resume more domestic drilling, felt they had to change their bets on the future?
If you want to rail against a "fundie," fine. If it demonstrated you actually knew something about things, you wouldn't make yourself look far more stupid than the supposedly stupid fundie.