End of the Bush-Clinton Era? By Robert Parry
May 25, 2008
<snip>
Some Democrats have come to see the Clintons as less a cats-and-dogs enemy of the Bushes than two sides of the same coin, a kind of duopoly that is more common in Third World nations where two ruling families trade power back and forth without disrupting the power structure.
In this view, Bill Clinton essentially earned his bones with the Bush family in 1993 when he swept a dustbin full of Republican scandals under the rug – including the Iran-Contra Affair, Iraq-gate and the October Surprise question.
President Clinton may have thought he was being responsible and buying some bipartisan peace. But he actually cemented an incomplete and false history of the Reagan-Bush period, thus denying the American people a thorough understanding of what their government had done over those dozen years.
<snip>
Clinton also freed up the Republican attack machine from playing defense for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, enabling it to go on the offensive against Clinton and his wife. In other words, Clinton’s acquiescence to the Reagan-Bush cover-ups proved to be both wrongheaded and shortsighted.
Yet Clinton didn’t seem to learn much. Despite the pummeling he took – including suffering only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history – Bill Clinton still kept his Justice Department on the sidelines when George W. Bush stole the Florida election and thus the White House from Al Gore in 2000.
Then, after leaving office, Clinton made one of his chief priorities the forging of an alliance with George H.W. Bush, as they traveled around the world on humanitarian missions. This Bush-Clinton tandem became a feel-good measure of how Washington insiders gauge bipartisanship, the two ruling families working together.
Read much more at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/052508.html