Top 10 Reasons Why Bill Clinton Was a Bad

President

© Alex Noudelman

About Bill Clinton

William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd Presidentof the United States was the Democrat’s answer to Reagan. In a 2013 poll, CNN ranked him as the third-greatest president of all time. Over three-quarters of registered voters today see his tenure as positive. But is he really? Let’s find out.

10. He Had a Hand in Causing Financial Crisis of 2008

The financial crash of 2008 was the result of so many complex, compounding factors that people still can’t agree on who, if anyone, was responsible. However, there’s one name that keeps cropping up again and again: Bill Clinton.

Although he ran on a ticket of reeling in the excesses of big business, Clinton quickly became the financial district’s best friend. During his years in office he completely failed to act on regulating derivatives, a central cause of the crash. In 1999, he repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a nifty bit of legislation that effectively blocked the creation of today’s dangerously unstable super-banks. As The Guardian noted in 2009, sub-prime loans before the repeal accounted for only 5 percent of all mortgage-lending. By the time of the crash, they’d hit 30.

9. He Started “Extraordinary Rendition”

“Extraordinary rendition” is when shady government operatives stuff a bag over your head and fly you off to some foreign country where they can legally torture you. It sounds like something Alex Jones might dream up in a paranoid frenzy, but it’s a well-documented phenomenon under both Bush, Jr. and Obama—and Bill Clinton was the guy who started it all.

Clinton and Gore signed off on the first rendition back in the ’90s, despite being aware that it breached international law. Until recently, rendered people frequently wound up in the prison cells of places like Mubarak’s Egypt or Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were tortured with electric shocks, rape, beatings, and even crucifixion. It can sometimes go hideously wrong: In 2003, the CIA snatched a terrorist off the streets and beat, tortured, and sodomized him, only to discover they’d accidentally grabbed the wrong man. The victim just happened to share a name with a wanted criminal. His suffering came care of the Clinton/Gore dream team.

8. He Bombed a Pharmaceutical Factory

On August 20, 1998, an American submarine locked onto a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan and launched a barrage of missiles. The attack had been authorized by the president himself in retaliation for a US embassy bombing in Nairobi. Within seconds, the factory had been obliterated, killing one person and wounding several others. It was only then that it was discovered that the factory wasn’t used for producing WMDs at all. It was one of only three pharmaceutical factories in the whole of Sudan.

In less than a second, the airstrike had wiped out Sudan’s ability to treat devastating illnesses like tuberculosis, malaria, and meningitis at a time when the country was swept by disease and civil war. To add insult to injury, there was no money to rebuild, resulting in epidemics sweeping the land and killing thousands. Faulty intelligence was blamed at the time, but by 2000, it was obvious that the field reports were too sketchy to warrant even a second look, let alone a surgical strike. It was a simple overreaction that wound up killing thousands of sick children.

7. He Had the Worst Imprisonment Record

 In May, on the heels of the unrest in Baltimore sparked by Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, Clinton apologized for locking too many people up. Thanks, Bill.

The 2.4 million people in prison and the 160,000 Americans serving life in prison largely because of his policies might be excused for not accepting Clinton's apology. Tag-teaming with ex-President Ronald Reagan, Clinton is the president most responsible for the mass incarceration of Americans on an epic scale. The gung-ho crime fighter-in-chief passed the single most damaging law with his omnibus federal crime bill in 1994, which included the infamous “three strikes” law (three felony convictions means a life sentence) and ensured that mandatory minimum sentences imprisoned even low-level, non-violent offenders for a long, long time.

6. Harsh Welfare Reforms

 The consequences of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill have been devastating for millions of American families. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 took a page directly from Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

In an atmosphere steeped in decades of conservative scaremongering around the specter of sexually reckless “welfare queens,” Clinton’s 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it” played directly to white voters' fears of black crime and poverty. Twenty years after scrapping the longstanding Aid to Families with Dependent Children in favor of the right wing’s underfunded and more punitive vision, the number of poor American children has exploded and black welfare recipients are subject to the system’s most stringent rules.

5. He gave Into Homophobia

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a piece of legislation that legally defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. It was specifically designed to stop homosexual couples from accessing the 1,000-plus federal rights afforded to straight people, including the right to visit your long-term partner in the hospital. In short, it was a piece of paper that ensured not everyone was equal before the law—and Bill Clinton signed it.

Clinton had specifically gone out of his way to court the gay community during his campaign, but by signing off on DOMA and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act of 1993, he chose to quietly shelve his beliefs and betray those who voted for him in exchange for political capital with the GOP. To make matters worse, his campaign team used this betrayal to earn extra votes in the Southern Christian states.

4. Gave Into Homophobia

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a piece of legislation that legally defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. It was specifically designed to stop homosexual couples from accessing the 1,000-plus federal rights afforded to straight people, including the right to visit your long-term partner in the hospital. In short, it was a piece of paper that ensured not everyone was equal before the law—and Bill Clinton signed it.

Clinton had specifically gone out of his way to court the gay community during his campaign, but by signing off on DOMA and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act of 1993, he chose to quietly shelve his beliefs and betray those who voted for him in exchange for political capital with the GOP. To make matters worse, his campaign team used this betrayal to earn extra votes in the Southern Christian states.

3. He Committed Perjury

Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, was impeached by the House of Representatives on two charges, one of perjury and one of obstruction of justice, on December 19, 1998. Two other impeachment articles, a second perjury charge and a charge of abuse of power, failed in the House. He was acquitted of both charges by the Senate on February 12, 1999. Despite being acquitted, we all saw him wag his finger where it shouldn’t have.

2. Rwandan Genocide

The Rwanda genocide was a 100-day killing spree by ethnic Hutus against their Tutsi neighbors. It was a mindless slaughter that killed up to 800,000 people. Corpses littered the streets and children were dismembered and raped. Then-President Clinton reacted to this senseless tragedy—arguably the worst of the 20th century—by burying any evidence of it.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Clinton White House insisted they’d been unaware of the scale of suffering. In 2004, however, classified documents emerged proving that the CIA had informed Clinton, Gore, and 100 top officials that a genocide was underway within 17 days of the first killings. Had they spoken out at the UN or piled pressure on Rwanda, it’s likely that the slaughter could have been stopped before reaching such disturbing proportions. By Clinton’s own estimate, their silence cost upward of 300,000 lives.

1. Inconsistent Foreign Policy

Clinton’s Foreign Policy Lacked Vision. He offered a vision, but nobody paid any attention. One of Clinton's core missions as President, he often said, was to prepare Americans for a world in which global economic forces failed to respect national boundaries. Perhaps his greatest accomplishments, then, came in the area of economic globalization-—establishing several new regimes of free trade, with NAFTA and GATT.  His intentions when entering into China, Somalia and Bosnia are still uncertain and are debated by scholars because there was no immediate threat from any of the 3 countries.

Thank you for reading!

© Alex Noudelman