Bill Clinton Has One Last Golden Opportunity to Screw America

You might think Bill Clinton had already done enough for this country. After all, he provided al Qaeda's motivation for 9/11 by keeping U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, strangling Iraq, and supporting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He teed up the Iraq war for George Bush by taking constantly about Saddam's terrifying WMD and signing the Iraq Liberation Act. He deregulated Wall Street, setting the stage for a worldwide economic collapse. And he hollowed out the Democratic party and U.S. left so thoroughly that there was essentially no resistance to Bush.

But some people feel he still has more to give. This is from a long New York Magazine article about Clinton and Obama:

Joel Johnson [a top Clinton aide during his administration and now a D.C. lobbyist] believes Clinton could help Obama (assuming he wins) with a renewed pursuit of a grand bargain on entitlements and taxes as Washington grapples right after the election with the so-called fiscal cliff. “It’s no secret that Obama was ready to go pretty far out on entitlement reform with Boehner,” says Johnson. “Who better to be a thought leader about that process than Clinton? In terms of making some of the hard decisions that Democrats are gonna have to make, and being able to talk about the beauty of a budget deal and what it can do for the economy. So I actually think he will have a postelection role in that intense period. The same credibility that he demonstrated in the convention speech can be applied to the legislative crisis that we’re going to be in in the next six to eight months.”

The idea of Clinton doing just that, or assisting his wife on her way to the White House, is appealing on a multitude of levels...

Would Clinton want to do this? Of course he would. You may remember his chummy discussion with Paul Ryan about cutting Medicare. And he was eager to work with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security until the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. He'd be chomping at the bit to fly one last mission.

— Jon Schwarz