Surplus of Obfuscation

Craig Steiner of TownHall is intent on correcting the historical record, demolishing what he calls the "Clinton surplus myth." Much of what he says is fairly straightforward, though what he leaves out is hugely instructive.

In particular, this phrase has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

While not defending the increase of the federal debt under President Bush, it's curious to see Clinton's record promoted as having generated a surplus. It never happened. There was never a surplus and the facts support that position. In fact, far from a $360 billion reduction in the national debt in FY1998-FY2000, there was an increase of $281 billion.

Steiner's argument rests on the statistics that show the total national debt continued to increase every year under President Clinton, if you account for the borrowing from the Social Security trust fund. True, that.

But applying Steiner's accounting methods across the board hardly serves as a condemnation of William J. Clinton's stewardship of the economy. Instead it highlights the fiscal recklessness of Ronald W. Reagan and George W. Bush - something Steiner takes pains to avoid discussing.

It's quite true that, starting with LBJ, the government operated under what's called a "unified budget," masking the size of the budget deficit because of borrowing from the SS trust fund (though it's more complicated than that if you follow the link). But it's also true that SS is treated as "off-budget" (which Steiner calls "twisted Washington accounting games") because its income and outlays are fixed by statute, and not subject to the annual budgetary process. Steiner himself concedes that "Social Security is legally required to use all its surpluses to buy U.S. Government securities," a process not unique to or controlled by Clinton. But he leaps from there to claiming that the trust fund therefore doesn't exist because "the money has already been spent--in part, effectively, to pay down the public debt under Clinton."

This is a bit rich coming from the same guy who doesn't wish to discuss the increase in debt under Bush the Lesser - or even mention Ronald Reagan's record. If you insist on using "total increase in debt" as the metric, then, as the chart above shows, Clinton comes out smelling like a rose compared to the competition (and Bush's the Elder's performance was made possible by the fact that Democrats in Congress forced him to accept tax hikes to help dig out from Reagan's debt burden).

What's true is that Clinton's first budget, passed over unanimous Republican opposition, made it possible to further dig out from the deep hole Reagan left us in, and allowed the Fed to loosen monetary policy enough to fuel the longest post-war stretch of GDP growth. Under Clinton's last budgets, the government was taking in more than it spent - if you don't count the trust fund borrowing. But if you do count it, Clinton still looks like the most prudent budgeter we've had. As Steiner's own stats show, the FY2000 budget resulted in a total increase in public debt of only $18 billion - a rounding error compared the mess Bush II left us in.

Clinton left office under a recession, mild compared to the previous Bush's, and insignificant compared to the subsequent Bush's. As a result the FY 2001 budget showed higher outlays and lower receipts. But conservatives can't have it both ways. If it's correct to attribute FY2001 to Clinton's policies - and it is - then it's also correct to put the disastrous FY2009 in W's column. You certainly wouldn't know that from all the right-wing websites claiming Obama has doubled (or tripled) the debt,

Finally, Steiner dismisses any critics who argue that debt as a share of GDP is a better measure of fiscal performance. But as he concedes, it's a measure of the total debt burden, not the total amount - which is precisely the point. Given GDP and employment growth under Clinton, the modest increases in total debt were less burdensome, just as the anemic growth under Bush II made his debt increases more painful by far. The accompanying chart shows why conservatives would rather we avoid looking at this particular metric.

Bottom line is that Steiner is correct to say that total indebtedness increased (modestly) under Clinton. He can take the former president and his defenders to task for rhetorical excess in claiming he reduced the debt (though he did reduce the deficit, considerably), But conservatives can't use that argument to make the case that Clinton's economic performance was any kind of a disaster. The disaster came later, when George W. Bush threw Clinton's budgeting out the window and started handing out tax cuts on the grounds that the government was "overcharging" us. Compare that to what Clinton said we should do with the alleged surpluses he was generating: "Save Social Security."

1997: The Defeat of Fast Track

I still have a few old rants from the 90s lying around, but just a few. This anti-"free trade" polemic referred to the plan for such agreements to be rushed through Congress on an up-or-down vote – no amendments allowed. An aroused public flooded the Capitol switchboard with calls and shot down that plan. There is a current news hook here, a JGRTWT from the UK paper The Independent. Johann Hari explains that the crimes of DSK, odious as they are, are really the least of the matter at the IMF. As he puts it: "Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death." The IMF's "free trade" agenda of global Reaganomics has led to mass suffering on a planetary scale. An aroused public would be helpful in this case as well. 

I've heard several commentators commentate to the effect that the defeat of fast track represents the beginning of Clinton's lame duck era (never mind that it was a defeat for Gingrich as well). The conventional wisdom also has it that this is a major blow to Al Gore in his race with Dick Gephardt for the Democratic nomination in '00. None of this exactly breaks my heart.

Of course it's too early to write off anybody with the political skills of Bill Clinton, but there are limits to what even he can do to finesse the differences between the Gingrich Republicans and the Gephardt Democrats. Some would argue that Clinton just had to kiss the Republicans' butts if he wanted to pass any of his agenda, such as it is. Others would argue that we might not have a Republican Congress in the first place if Clinton hadn't been such a weasel.

But apparently some Democrats have reached the limits of their tolerance for GOP butt-kissing by Mr. Clinton (and Mr. Gore). I consider this all to the good. And apparently a good many of them were insulted by Clinton's characterization of this issue as a "no-brainer." I saw Nancy Pelosi on TV declaring against fast track right after that, saying, "Mr. President, I would have hoped you could see why those of us who support human rights, the environment and labor rights couldn't vote with the Republicans on this one." According to the New York Times, Rep. DeFazio of Oregon confronted Erskine Bowles by calling the President's comments "outrageous and insulting," and indicating that it was "tantamount to saying that Bowles favored fast track not on its merits, but simply to increase the size of his stock portfolio."

So I guess it was a brainer after all. But that wasn't the only instance of arrogance and incompetence from Clinton on this one. The very closeness of the margin indicates that he might have been able to pull it off, but word is that he got started awfully late, and failed to coordinate his lobbying efforts with those of interested corporate poobahs. But what finally killed fast track was that Clinton had loaded it with far too many Republican goodies for the Democrats to swallow.

Those who commentate for a living seem somewhat bewildered by all of this. A few days prior to the scheduled vote, the San Jose Mercury News pulled out all the stops in echoing the President's no-brainer stance. In both a regular editorial and a "news analysis" in the front section, the Merc implied that opponents of fast track were just naive fools, motivated by nothing other than knee-jerk protectionism. And in a front-page, above-the-fold news headline, no less, the Merc officially pronounced fast track a "net plus" for Silicon Valley. So much for balanced journalism.

Afterwards, the New Yawk Times, in its own "news analysis," struggled to come to terms with "The Impact." Since the Times had led the media cheering squads for NAFTA (or Nafta, as they prefer to call it), burying opponents in an avalanche of think-tank op-eds, this was no small task. But, as it turns out, the defeat of fast track will probably have very little effect, or subtle effects at worst. You see, we're the largest market in the world, and other countries will ignore us at their peril. And anyway, Mr. Clinton has negotiated well over a hundred trade agreements without fast track.

Of course, these are the exact same arguments that fast track opponents advanced in arguing that we needn't accept the Gingrich/Armey/Archer version of fast track. Fast track opponents aren't opposed to trade; they're opposed to trade policies that ignore human rights. But you'd have to look long and hard to find such subtle arguments in the Times before fast track went down in flames.

Both the media and the GOP are now attributing their defeat to a sneaky power play by "big labor bosses." But while labor did make a massive effort to derail the legislation, they were by no means alone. Environmental, human rights and consumer advocacy groups also worked hard to keep this from being crammed down our throats. And plenty of us ordinary citizens are fed up with the broken promises of NAFTA, and weren't shy about saying so. Believe it or not, I have never called my congressional representative for any reason in my life. But I called Rep. Pastor's office to urge him to vote no on fast track. An aide cheerfully told me that the Congressman hadn't made up his mind, but was leaning to no.

This time enough of us leaned to no to hand Gingrich and Clinton a major defeat. If that means Mr. Clinton's webbed foot is limping, so be it. This is a victory for the little folks and will make it considerably more difficult for the investing classes to sneak in the MAI without public debate, as they had hoped to do with NAFTA. Just to remind you, the MAI, coming up next spring, will allow multinational corporations to sue governments to nullify laws they don't like, and will remove all barriers to international capital taking over Third World countries. Let's all make a big stink over that one too, shall we?

1998: The Starr Report

Okay, I read every last word of the Starr Report, and watched the President weaseling his way through his Grand Jury testimony. I know most of you would rather have all your teeth pulled, but I just figure it's part of my job. Lucky me.

The Starr Report proposes eleven possible impeachment counts against the President (in contrast, Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski simply forwarded his evidence to Congress without comment). Most of them are tenuous at best. The perjury counts would be laughed out of court if the defendant were anyone other than the President. Clinton's oily lawyers are correct when they state that lying is not the same as perjury; Clinton is an oily lawyer himself, and while he's clearly lying, he seems to have largely avoided the perjury trap. And count eleven is even more ridiculous, charging that Clinton's "frivolous" litigation of executive privilege claims constitutes an abuse of power.

But I have bad news for Clinton partisans. Counts six and seven, on obstruction of justice, look to me like they have some teeth to them. Miss Lewinsky's account of this is far more credible than Mr. Clinton's, and if she is to believed, the two of them conspired to file a false affidavit and to withhold evidence which was under subpoena. I don't think the head of the Executive Branch should be allowed to get away with this kind of conduct. It may well warrant an impeachment inquiry - but at the same time, I don't think it warrants removal from office.

As Gerald Ford once famously remarked, an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House decides it to be at any given time. And if impeachment is an inherently political process, so too are the investigations of the President. There would have been no "justice" for him to obstruct without a well-funded network of right-wing wackos collaborating on endlessly digging up dirt on him. That's not to say that the Clinton Administration hasn't been full of odious ethical lapses - but those mostly concern policy.

For the attack dogs of the right who complain that this is the most corrupt administration in history, let's remember that over 400 members of the Reagan Administration were indicted or investigated. And while the first impeachment count against Richard Nixon charged him with lying to the American people, he was lying about attempts to subvert the Constitution - not about with whom he was making whoopee.

So let's put this in perspective. George Bush had a longtime mistress in the State Department. Ronald Reagan carried on for years, both as Governor and President, with a fetching ex-Nazi from Austria. Lyndon Johnson used to screw women on his desk in the Oval Office, never mind a side room (Harding preferred White House closets). After LBJ was caught once by Lady Bird, he had an alarm system installed so he'd know whenever she left the living quarters. Both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had their longtime extramarital partners, as did Ike. And never mind JFK. Hell, even Nixon was rumored to have made some sort of whoopee with a China lobbyist.

Does anybody doubt they would have lied to us about these affairs? Nixon would lie about things he didn't even need to, just to keep in practice. Ike lied to us about the U2 flight; JFK, about the Bay of Pigs; LBJ, about the Gulf of Tonkin. Reagan and Bush lied about their illegal wars, which left thousands of blood stains, not semen stains. Gerald Ford was a part of the biggest lie in our history, the Warren Commission Report. And Jimmy Carter lied when he said he'd never lie to us.

By now, the Republicans have done the seemingly impossible: make me want to hold my nose and support Bill Clinton. In fact, I believe the only reason his poll numbers stay high is that people know the GOP doesn't have a leg to stand on, whether in terms of squirrely campaign financing or extramarital affairs. Believe me, I've had a bellyfull of Bill; I'll be glad to see the backside of him, as inelegant as that sounds. But I don't want to see him tossed out of office on such blatantly partisan charges. Once again, a plague on both their stinking houses.

And while the media give us saturation coverage of Monica's dress (so to speak), here's what the Lizard Party has been doing: Killed the minimum wage hike. Killed campaign finance reform again, on a filibuster with 52 Senators in favor, but 60 needed to overrule Trent Lott. Made it more difficult for ordinary folks (but not big corporations) to declare bankruptcy. Paved the way for the high-tech industry to import cheap workers instead of hiring Americans. Watered down the Patients' Bill of Rights. Loaded up Interior appropriations with anti-environmental riders. And that's just for starters (but hey, we killed fast track again!)

So while it's clear that Al Gore wouldn't be much worse than Bill, he wouldn't be much better, either, and he'd leave Newt as next in line. I do expect further shoes to drop on the Clinton scandals (this is, after all, a slow-motion coup attempt), but they'll have to come up with something more substantial than what we've seen so far. So I say, reluctantly: two cheers for the Weasel Party.

1999: The Bogus Chinese Spy Scandal

This particular scandal was just one of many that the GOP noise machine has summoned up and amplified through its Faux News and hate radio conduits over the years; by now they have it down to a science.

It's not that I don't think the Chinese were/are spying on us - that's self-evident. But what's interesting is what nobody seemed to suspect at the time: far from mollycoddling the Chinese, Clinton may have actually bombed their embassy on purpose during the Kosovo War.

Okay, plenty of people suspected that, but now we have some informed speculation for the reason. The Serbs had managed to shoot down a Stealth bomber, and the Chinese embassy had parts of the wreckage on hand for analysis. Now that the Chinese have stealth technology of their own, it looks in retrospect like the unusual bombing run that took out their embassy was an unsuccessful attempt to prevent such a development.

A couple issues ago I promised I would say something about the "bogus Chinese spy scandal." It's not that I think the Clinton Administration is incapable of selling off policy to the highest bidder (just like its illustrious predecessors). It's just that our China policy has always been remarkably bipartisan: the purchasing power of 1.2 billion Chinese has always been far more important to us than their human rights.

1994: Post-Election Anguish

I kind of felt the same way this past November, but it's helpful to remember that we survived those dark days, and we'll get through these, too. Because one thing you can always count on with the Republicans: they're bound to overplay their hands.

Note: In those days, instead of donkeys and elephants, I was prone to call the Democrats "Weasels" and the Republicans "lizards." The rationale was, they're both egg-suckers, but at least a weasel won't eat their young.

Yarrrrggghhh.

Those of you who read the fine print at the bottom of this page know that the official motto of the Tucson Comic News is "Dedicated to saving the planet from the power-addicted greedheads before it's too late."

There are a few points about this phrase that need to be clarified. The first is that, as several of you have pointed out, the planet is likely to be around for the foreseeable future; it's humanity that needs to be saved (okay, call it poetic license). The second point is that, given the current political climate, it's probably already too late.

1998: The Ballad of Monica and Bill

From February of 1998, a more innocent time....

Times like these are good for the cartoon business, but not so good for the nation's business. While the media feeding frenzy on the president's sex life continues unabated, we all have much less attention for what the other hand is doing. In the meantime (and it could get meaner still) the Asian Contagion has the global economy possibly teetering on the abyss, and our political leaders are cheerfully preparing to start another war, blithely ignoring the opposition of most of the rest of the planet.

But enough about that! What about Monica and Bill? My own view, as previously stated, is that the ownership of the country prefers politicians with the potential for blackmail when promoting or vetoing candidates for higher office. That way, if substantive policy disputes arrive, the hired hand can be fired with impunity. The politics of scandal in this country are such that nearly every major politician has major dirt on them, but if they play ball, they survive. Witness Henry Hyde and Phil Gramm, with S&L scandals that make Whitewater look like a carny sideshow, or the adulterous affairs of Bob Dole and George Bush, studiously underpublicized.

1999: The Impeachment of Bill Clinton

As this issue goes to press, the Senate seems to have come to the conclusion that it's time to come to a conclusion. With the lopsided vote against calling live witnesses, the stage is now set for the President's impeachment trial to come to an end on Friday, February 12, as scheduled. Of course, this slow-motion train wreck has reversed itself so many times that it's not really safe to make any predictions until all the Congresscritters have voted and left for their vacations. But, God willing, it'll all be over soon.

1998: Clinton vs. Nixon

Oh man, I just found the hook for posting this re-run comparing the transgressions of Clinton with those of Nixon (and while surfing for a photo to accompany the post, I found this page arguing that Nixon's domestic policies were more liberal than Clinton's). Over at Antiwar.com, John Feffer compares Nixon to Obama. His argument is that Nixon was simultaneously a great peacemaker and a cruel warmonger. In "Emulating Nixon," he discusses Obama's record of arms control successes and contrasts that with his resort to arms in the Af-Pak conflict – and this was written in 2009, well before the resort to arms in North Africa. Does this particular shoe fit? Since my record of prognostication is spotty at best (see below) let's just say, as the saying goes, chronology will elaborate.

We seem to be the victims of an ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Longtime readers will recall that after President Clinton's re-election in 1996, I lay out even odds that he would not finish out his second term. It looks like those odds are now, at the very least, 60-40 against.

As this issue goes to press, Independent Inquisitor Kenneth Starr has just delivered his report to Congress, all 36 cartons of it. By the time you read this, the contents will be leaking all over Washington. And members of his own party are distancing themselves from the President, just as the Republicans did when the stench of Nixon's crimes grew too strong to ignore.

1997: The Great Budget Deal

Yes, a deal has been reached, but nothing is ever final in Washington, DC. And as Mark Twain may or may not have said, history may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes:

So there do seem to be some signs of a healthier economy, and not just in Tucson. The stock market is humming along, and we have the lowest inflation and unemployment numbers in decades. Of course, those unemployment numbers can be a bit deceiving. The official Commerce Department rate doesn't calculate the number of discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers in its monthly data on who's out of work. If they did, our unemployment rate would be roughly double what's reported, a number pretty much in line with those of the European Community.

Still, things could be a lot worse... and for plenty of folks, they are.

1996: Bob Dole's Nomination

Lately both Drum and BooMan have been having a bit of sport with the feckless GOP field for the '12 nomination. Just to prove that life imitates art, the Reagan Library has announced that the first GOP debate has been postponed until September for lack of interest. You couldn't make something like that up.

In order to show anyone exasperated with Obama that it could always be worse, here's a look back at Bill Clinton's hapless 1996 challenger, Bob Dole. Of course the current crop of GOP hopefuls make Dole look like Dennis Kucinich, but it bears repeating: it could always be worse.

For the past three years, this space has been critical of Bill Clinton more often than not. Since I never supported him in the first place, I can't say I'm disillusioned by his performance, but I can say it's even worse than I expected. From the anti-labor and anti-environmental NAFTA and GATT treaties, to the odious crime bill, the "anti-terrorism" legislation that suspends the right of habeas corpus, and the profoundly misguided telecommunications bill, Clinton's record has been a sorry litany of disasters for working Americans, and victories for plutocrats and oligarchs.

Having said that, it's time to point out that the Republican Party has managed to nominate someone even worse. Last night I watched Bob Dole give "the most important speech of his career." Like most political speeches, it was full of lies. One of my favorites was his characterization of Clinton's 1993 tax increase as the "biggest in history." This was red meat for the GOP delegates, but conveniently overlooked the 1982 tax increase pushed through the Senate by Majority Leader Bob Dole. Both in constant dollars and as a percentage of GDP, Dole's tax increase was bigger than Clinton's. And, as noted previously in this space, the 1983 Social Security tax increase-also shepherded by Dole-is the all-time champ.

1999: "Peace" in Kosovo

The persistent belief that Kosovo was a "good war" seems to have informed a lot of thinking about the possibility of intervening in Libya. My good friend David Gibbs has addressed this paradigm, in book-length, article-length and op-ed formats. I think the entire episode is worth revisiting in detail, with an eye to challenging one's own assumptions, wherever one stood at the time.

As this issue hits the streets, NATO troops are hitting the ground in Kosovo, having finally ended their massive bombardment of Yugoslavia. The President and much of the corporate media will no doubt be portraying this as a wonderful victory for our side. But it comes at a terrible price, and as with our much longer war against Vietnam, the terms agreed to at the end are not much different from what we could have got in the first place.

1999: Kosovo (During)

From May of 1999 comes further ranting on the topic of the Kosovo War. As a "liberal" intervention, it was subject to a great deal of support from people who normally oppose that sort of thing, and vice versa – kind of like right now. It also engendered some fairly bitter arguments, certainly on the former side. Certainly as Mark Twain said (whoops, apocryphal), history does not repeat itself – but sometimes it rhymes:

Now, last month I allowed as how I was somewhat suspicious of Uncle Sam's professed motives for his latest intervention. What I know now that I didn't know then is that the Rambouillet accords were a complete farce. The text was kept secret until well after the bombing began, and now we can see why. Rambouillet wasn't about negotiation; it was an ultimatum: sign here or we bomb you. But the document that we were asking Yugoslavia to sign would have been rejected by any sovereign nation on earth. It called for NATO troops to occupy not only Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia. It gave NATO the right to use all Yugoslavian roads, bridges, airports and seaports free of charge, not to mention the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And it stipulated that Kosovo would convert to a "free-market" economy, under the supervision of the NATO commander.

1995: The Budget Impasse

Some of of the story below seems oddly familiar. Instead of Bill Clinton negotiating with himself, we have Barack Obama, and intstead of Newt threatening to shut the government down, we have Boehner. However, we already know how that one turned out, which puts Boehner in a bit of a bind. Matt Yglesias points out that Boehner is stuck in a trap of his own making, while Kevin Drum wonders, when does he cave in: now or later?

As this issue goes to press, the budget impasse between the executive and legislative branches remains unresolved. Unless a deal is cut by December 15, the government will run out of money again, and only another stopgap measure or a final agreement will prevent another shutdown.

Both sides will have to grapple with the contradictions within their ranks. The GOP will have to split the difference between the slash-and-burn firebrands in the House and the more cautious approach in the Senate, while Bill Clinton will have to come to terms with himself.

I'm glad the President finally found a point at which he'll draw the line. The odious GOP budget plans ought to have been countered more aggressively from the start. I'm especially gratified that the President is so resolutely against the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor. Taking away this break for the working class while handing out tax cuts to the wealthy is typical GOP, and the President would have little claim to his party's base if he went along.

2000: Ten Worst Things Bill Clinton Did

This is the second half of the post directly beneath, from the September 2000 issue of the Tucson Comic News:

1. Kosovo 
 You can argue that Clinton inherited a mess in the former Yugoslavia from the Bush Administration. But in the case of Kosovo, the Clinton Administration made things far worse, turning a disaster into a catastrophe. They did this first by arming, funding and training the KLA, the most violent, corrupt and extreme faction in Kosovo, while turning their backs on the pacifist movement of Ibrahim Rugova, which had far more popular support. Then there were the negotiations at Rambouillet, which as one State Department official put it at the time, "deliberately set the bar too high." The Clintonistas hoped that a week or so of airstrikes would force Yugoslavia to comply with our demands for a NATO occupation force. Instead, the week turned into 78 days of increasingly brutal bombing of Yugoslavia's civilian infrastructure, along with far more refugees and casualties than before we got involved. Once we got our way and our troops occupied Kosovo, the KLA ran off virtually the entire Serb population, along with Jews, Gypsies, Turks, Bulgarians, and anyone else, including any Albanians who objected to their thuggish kleptocracy. Kosovo is now overrun with drug traffickers and forced prostitution, while the countryside is littered with unexploded cluster bombs and radioactive uranium shells. And still the killing continues.

2000: Ten Best Things Bill Clinton Did

For better or worse, the life of the Tucson Comic News coincided almost exactly with Bill Clinton's two terms in office. For the last issue, I compiled top ten lists of the best and worst things Clinton did as president. First, the good news; then for the Ten Worst Things, click here.

1. Suspending the Gag Rule 
On his very first day in office, Clinton affirmed his pro-choice credentials by issuing an executive order overturning the odious gag order maintained by the Reagan and Bush Administrations, This prohibited any medical facility receiving federal funds from even mentioning the possibility of abortion with their patients. Despite its questionable constitutionality, the Gag Rule survived until Clinton made killing it his first priority.

2. Family Leave
 While he still had a Democratic majority in the Congress, Clinton managed to take one small step towards the kinds of benefits enjoyed by workers in other industrial democracies. Because of this bill, workers are allowed unpaid leave to care for their sick parents or children without fear of losing their jobs. Continuing attempts to allow paid family leave have of course met with a GOP stonewall.

1994: The Haiti Intervention

While our focus rightly continues to be on the people of Egypt, our neighbors in Haiti continue to suffer under the combination of Mother Nature's wrath and the legacy of US domination. Here's a piece from the December 1994 Tucson Comic News, written as US troops were once again dispatched to Port-au-Prince. For more background on Haiti, see chapter 41 of The CIA's Greatest Hits.

It used to be a truism of American politics that the Democrats (Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ) would get us into wars, while the Republicans (Hoover, Ike, Nixon) would get us into recessions and depressions. Well, twelve years of Reaganbush, with three wars, capped by a recession, pretty much shot down that cliche. But these days, the Democrats can't seem to run a war to save their lives.

Now, if the Republicans wanted to invade Haiti (not that they would, but bear with me) they would have leaked Forrest Gump-styled digital footage of General Cedras buggering dogs in the street, and whipped this whole country into a blood frenzy before moving any troops. The delicious ambivalence on the part of hawks in both parties towards our latest "adventure" shows what happens when they find they've taken their lip service toward democracy and human rights a bit too far.

It may just be that we've come to the point in the New World Order in which homicidal kleptocracies like Somoza's Nicaragua, or Pinochet's Chile, are just too downright embarrassing to be client states of the good old USA - though I wouldn't bet the farm on it just yet. Perhaps, though, a better-packaged neocolonialism is what is now being sought.

After expending American blood and treasure to put the Emir of Kuwait and Guillermo Endara into power-ostensibly to uphold international law-the US had a tough time explaining to its allies exactly why we would tolerate a junta of machete-wielding maniacs right in our "backyard." Fact is, as FDR said about Somoza, "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." And make no mistake about it, those are our machete-wielding maniacs down there. The Haitian military was trained and financed by the US, with many of its top leaders, including General Cedras, on the CIA payroll. Most of them learned their craft at the infamous "School of Assassins" now located at Fort Bening, Georgia.

The US has been kicking the shit out of Haiti at least since 1801, when President Jefferson cut a deal with Napoleon to help suppress a slave revolt on that tortured island. Since then, we have invaded Haiti five times (well, six, now), including, as neo-pacifists like Bob Dole and Phil Gramm like to point out, an occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1935.

The way they tell it, though, we were just a bunch of well-meaning blunderers trying to plant the seeds of democracy, just like hapless Bill Clinton is today. I'm getting a little tired of having to repeat this: Wars have never been fought for altruistic reasons. Never have been, never will be.

What is even more galling is the frankly racist blather on the Sunday chat shows about how our latest expedition is doomed to failure because these Haitians just don't understand Democracy and Human Rights like our glorious selves, and besides, their "culture of violence" is just too deeply embedded. I have simply got to stop watching so much television.

As usual, the only reason this intervention is taking place is to clamp down on democracy, not to "plant its seeds." If we had any commitment to democracy, George Bush could have ended the Cedras coup with a few well-placed phone calls. Fact is, they were only too delighted to have Father Aristide tossed out on his ear after eight months. The slightest possibility of his return sent the CIA into a frenzy of leaks regarding his psychopathic character-based on information provided by the junta itself.

With or without Father Aristide, there's entirely too damn much democracy in Haiti to suit our ruling elites, and the only way to put a lid on it is with another US occupation.

Aristide has now been sufficiently handcuffed to inhibit his freedom to reform Haiti, and whether or not the Tonton Macoutes will be reined in remains to be seen. The US embassy has been maintaining databases of dissidents, just as they did in Indonesia before the 1965 coup that killed between a half million and a million leftists.

It was certainly a dramatic bit of television to send Jimmy, Colin and Sam down for the eleventh-hour save that-surprise!-left Cedras pretty much free to do as he pleases. Whether or not it produces any lasting bulge in Clinton's approval ratings, the Cedras summit was certainly in character.

Sam Nunn had, just the day before, taken to the floor of the Senate to urge that, somehow, the opposition to Aristide, "both legitimate and illegitimate," must be allowed to take part in Haitian political life. It doesn't take a Fellini to figure out the symbolism behind that little gem. Sam just wanted to make sure that the folks who gun down Haitian leftists in the streets can keep on doing what they do best. And with the help of Colin Powell, butcher of Desert Storm and admitted Iran-contra perjurer, and Jimmy Carter, whose much-vaunted dedication to human rights somehow never extended to the people of El Salvador, Senator Sam did just that. I guess I should be grateful he's not Secretary of Defense.