Bill Clinton: I Wish I Had Left White House "In A Coffin"

Reuters:

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Monday he would have preferred to leave the White House in a coffin because he loved being commander in chief, but signaled his political life was over.

Read the whole story: Reuters

Comments

[JCCross]

Bill wanted to leave the White House in a coffin? Well, there were certainly a lot of Republicans who tried to make that dream come true, and even more who were disappointed when it didn't happen. Thanks for sticking around, Bill!

[CaliGrown78]

Quantumspin you rock!!! You really laid it all out & maybe he shoulda left in a box after that long list you just laid out. Everyone seems to think that because we had no major crisis when he was in office that he is so magnificent & I gotta tell you I drank that kool-aid for a really long time. He was the first president I ever got to vote for & thought he was just the cats meow. Then time went on & I realized what a huge republicant @$$ kiss he was & that much of todays drama started with him. Let us not for get that when he was govenor of Arkansas there was the whole Mena scandal known as "the train detahs" when 2 boys where killed & it

[JRsNana]

Is it just me, or do the headline and what he actually said not correlate?

[pterack5]

bet the people of Haiti would agree. . .

[FreedomAgain]

Thanks for NAFTA Mr. Clinton - from the average American worker (now unemployed).

[quantumspin]

Under Clinton, we got: NAFTA, broadcasting deregulation (which gave rise to Clear Channel owning over 1200 stations, Glenn Beck (he was given the radio show by Clear Channel and automatically appeared on hundreds of cc stations), and banking and investment house deregulati­on---Clint­on signed the Gramm Act in an 11th hour final session, which deregulated banks and investment houses, leading to where we are today--his Treasury Secretary at the time, Larry Summers, along with Clinton adviser Robert Rubin, and Tim Geithner as the NY Fed president, all championed deregulation and Clinton and Democrats went along. Senator Gramm, don't forget said last year that Americans were just a bunch of whiners. He at the time was an economic adviser to McCain.

Clinton was one of the best GOP presidents we could have had. And for what it's worth, the dot.com phase of the Clinton economy was just a bubble set up by the investment houses that had a lot of money to make on dot.com IPOs, and on the up and down side of that industry. Regarding health care, recall that he told Obama to 'just pass something,' since in a year most people wouldn't remember what had happened, but Obama could still take credit for HC legislation.

[Steamboater]

Clinton's only one shining accomlishment was to have stopped the genocide in Bosnia but even with that, he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into ordering military action against the Serbs by Richard Holbrooke and by the embarrassment of his doing nothing by all the news reports of mass murders in Bosnia.

[klondiker]

Yeah, that was his one accomplishment. Well, that and the whole largest economic expansion in history and budget surplus year after year thing.

[sagondo]

As long as Americans make politics gang warfare we'll sustain the status quo.
We actually have the government we deserve: where too big to fail is allowed to exist at the expensive of generations of our populace. Clinton, we see now, is not the great president we were deceived into believing he was. I fail to understand how a man who left office millions in debt can be worth hundreds of millions less than a decade out of office...
As a nation we are ruled by fear yet fail to realize just how fearful we truly are. This kind of corporate fascism and political gangsterism would have a very hard way to go trying to root itself in a no non sense nation such as France: as much as the last administration criticized and villainized them.
It is sad that during the span of my adult life I cannot not recall one president who worked in defense of Main Street. I can foresee massive civil unrest when Main Street awakens from her sleep.
Clinton is just one in a long line of presidential gangsters; Obama is no different.

[TFlint]

HP STOP the lying headlines. !!!!! He never said that !!!!

[andyboy]

TFlint,

Stop the policing. We never asked for it! Go correct yourself somewhere else please. Or at least ell us all what he actually said. That might lend credence to your statement.

[sc300nc]

What's not to like about Clinton's presidency. Things were good in america then. No major crisis, Bill had it on autopilot, no hillary around to bother him, young female aides he could ogle and....well you know that story. Golfing at all of the best courses in the country. Sign me up!

[Patriot86]

NAFTA this was a disaster.

[martiniandabotoxchaser]

A bit of hyperbole, don't ya think.

[Matt7]

Speed et al.: Sounds like you want YOUR country back, too; only for different reasons:

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories
Of the way we were
Scattered pictures
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were

Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time rewritten every line
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me - Would we? Could we?

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it's the laughter
We will remember
Whenever we remember
The way we were"

. . . . . . . . -- from "The Way We Were"

We can't relive our past, but we CAN, if we will, build our future. Let's get to work.

[Goldie Locks]

"Bill Clinton: I Wish I Had Left White House "In A Coffin"
__________­__________­__________­__________­__________­__

That would've meant the inventor of the internet and master of climate change would have been CIC. Wow, that would have spelled D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R.

We can all thank our lucky stars!

[billygore2000]

Oh Yeah!: for eight unending years of Bush and Cheney.

[TFlint]

The quote is a lie. He never said that!

[RTIII]

Given that what followed WAS a REAL disaster, I'll take a possible disaster over a real one any day.

It would have been nice if the USA had never suffered two ineptly handled wars, one completely illegal, by the way, and so many countless failures and insults - like the whole torture thing, gitmo, etc - and had not suffered the huge erosion of our civil liberties with the so-called patriot act, which was really just an excuse to complete the police state's grip.

...I'd WAY rather making the mistake of reducing pollution and saving the planet for future generations than becoming ever more broke and having our money devalued through war spending and unprecedented deficits...
.

[Balzac]

Clinton was generally good. I was rooting for him the whole time, but cringing during certain crises. I became angry during the Bush years on account of their accommodating him, but I still like Bill and Hillary.

[Bob Hutson]

For all of you who are ragging on Bill Clinton I would just ask: What was it that you hated most about the Clinton Administration, was it the peace or was it the prosperity?

[WiltonDiary]

Thank YOU!

[jsarets]

We did have our obligatory military adventure in the Balkans during the Clinton admin.

They basically rode the Internet boom while deregulating the financial industry. They allowed investment banks and hedge funds to take on ridiculous amounts of leverage. They presided over the "innovation" of the credit default swap contract in 1997.

In the wake of the Long Term Capital Management collapse, they pursued their most aggressive deregulations, passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the Financial Services Modernization Act before leaving office.

They set the stage for the financial crisis while presiding over an anomalous tech boom. Obama doesn't have a dot-com bubble to hide behind. Otherwise, it's the same DLC corporatism.

[yankee222]

It was the fact that we had neither.

Where were you when the NASDAQ lost half it's value in Clinton's last year?
Did you notice the wars in the Balkans? Did you see us get our tails kicked in Somalia? Did you miss the weekly bombings in the Iraaq no fly zone?

Didn't you notice the Clinton repealed Glass-Stangall? Weren't you watching the first time the World Trade Center was attacked ?

Living under a rock makes for a bad historian

[rf dude]

So does looking for the dark cloud outside every silver lining...

[Gasparilla]

Clinton was in office one month when the World Trade Center was attacked. He took counterterrorism seriously, unlike Bush JR. And I would settle for those weekly bombings in the Iraqi no fly zone over Bush's invasion.

[timmmahhhh]

It would had been interesting to continue to see Clinton be president now. Glass-Steagall was overturned under his watch. While the economy would had likely been a lot less laissez-faire under Clinton would the overturning of this safeguard still have put us in this situation? After all the dot com bust happened at the end of his presidency. Would he had reinstated Glass-Steagall like I and many others keep hoping Obama and Frank will?