The Truth:   Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut led the drive to loosen accounting practices, which made the current crop of CEO scams possible.

Further Truth:   The Enron "favors for donations" trail leads straight to Clinton and not to Bush. (The Enron Corporation had access to the Clinton administration at its highest levels and even enlisted the U.S. Commerce and State Departments to grease deals for it. The taxpayer-supported Export-Import Bank subsidized Enron for more than $600 million in just one transaction.) As for Global Crossing, Terry McCauliff turned an investment of $100,000 into $18,000,000 in personal profit as his constituents and others "took the fall." They lost everything, while he walked off with their money in his pocket.

Democratic Fib:   Al Gore said, "Bill Clinton and I did a damn good job...." (on the economic front).

The Truth:   During Clinton's watch, the General Accounting Office cooked the books and the budget surplus was manufactured. According to the Washington Times, "... revised data reveal the annual economic growth rate during the first three quarters of 2000 averaged less than 2.7 percent, falling to 1.1 percent during the fourth quarter.... Far more staggering are the revisions to the alleged record levels of corporate profits for 2000. In fact, we now know pretax profits for nonfinancial domestic industries peaked at $504.5 billion in 1997. Those profits then declined during each of the next three years, completely contrary to the reports emanating from the Department of Commerce throughout the last three years of the Clinton-Gore administration."

In an editorial titled "DOD Can't Find $1.1 Trillion--Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Dis- aster," Kelly Patricia O'Meara reported in Insight magazine (8/15/01):   "Without ever using the word 'money,' a practice common among inspectors general (IGs), the deputy IG at the Pentagon read an eight-page summary of DOD fiduciary failures. He admitted that $4.4 trillion in adjustments to the Pentagon's books had to be cooked to compile the required financial statements and that $1.1 trillion of that amount could not be supported by reliable information. In other words, at the end of the last full year on Bill Clinton's watch, more than $1 trillion was simply gone and no one can be sure of when, where, or to whom this money went.

Further Truth:   During the eight years Clinton was President, the military, the FBI, and the CIA were left with insufficient funding and inadequate human intelligence resources. Enlisted military personnel qualified for food stamps and their deprivation helped to make "The Clinton Budget Surplus" possible.

Democratic Fib:   Hillary Clinton said on CNN on Monday, the 12th. of August:   "Tax cuts will increase the deficit."

The Truth:   The radio ad being run in Minnesota features a "sound bite" from an address by John F. Kennedy:   "So long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough jobs or enough profits." Congress passed Kennedy's proposed tax cuts and, just as he predicted, the tax cuts gave the economy a boost. They heightened growth, profits and incomes and sharply increased the governments tax revenues so that, by the end of the 1960s, there was a budget surplus.

Democratic Fib:   The current budget deficit is due to the Bush tax cut.

The Truth:   We are on war footing and wars cost money. Further, the sorry state in which Clinton left the military must be corrected and that is costing money too. On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he and Norwegian Defense Minister Kristin Devold were in basic agreement on the unprece- dented plan to have foreign pilots guard U.S. air space. Kristin Devold said, according to the New York Daily News, "Norway plans to be able to go together with Denmark and the Netherlands with a deployment of F-16s if we are needed later this year." The Norwegian pilots had the same authority as U.S. pilots to shoot down commercial airliners that posed a terrorist threat. Rumsfelt called Devold's offer "a very important thing" before noting that USAF assets were "scarce." Besides Clinton leaving our Air Force with "scarce assets," prior to recent military salary increases, there was a constant "brain drain" with the best and brightest leaving every branch of service. Military enlistments in all branches of service were down during Clinton's tenure in office.

Further Truth:   The attacks on the World Trade Center have necessitated measures to ensure our safety. All of these programs are costing billions of dollars, especially the "Federalization" of over 40,000 airport security guards.

Democratic Fib:   Clinton now says he had a plan in place, etc.

The Truth:   What he actually said was, "The NUMBER ONE priority of my adminis- tration is to reduce cigarette smoking by 40% and make all buildings smoke-free by the end of my second term. There is NOTHING more important " (Bill Clinton, 1997). The first terrorist attack on American soil took place at the World Trade Center in 1993. He essentially ignored that attack and subsequent attacks on the USS Cole and on our embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, etc. In his own taped words aired on FoxNews, Clinton stated that the plans he forwarded to Bush were doomed to failure.

Dick Morris, in a Wall Street Journal column saliently titled "While Clinton Fiddled." observed that Al-Qa'ida's war on America began in the first year of the Clinton administration, while the man whose primary responsibility was the safety of American citizens had his mind fixed on other things. Morris wrote, "After the February, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, President Clinton never visited the site and only alluded to it once. Visiting New Jersey shortly after the attack, he urged Americans not to 'overreact.' After the 1993 bombing--the first attack by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil--Mr. Clinton never met privately with the head of the CIA and, for him to blame his successor for his failures, is utter bypocrisy." We now know that Clinton also turned down the opportunity to capture Osama bin Laden back in 1996. In his eight years in office, President Clinton essentially ignored all international terrorist threats to our nation.

Democratic Fib:   We are against tax cuts," Hillary stated on CNN on Monday, the 12th. of August of this year.

The Truth:   The majority of Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are for tax cuts. Only the far-out Lewtwing Liberal Democrats are opposed to tax cuts. They are the same ones who are also against tax rebates. Senator Clinton further stated on CNN that she is actually for raising taxes. This is what she proposes at a time when lower taxes would provably stimulate our economy.

In short, the "Clinton Budget Surplus" was mostly apocryphal and whatever surplus actually existed (hard to determine, due to phony bookkeeping) was primarily at the expense of the military and national security. We are now paying the price for Bill Clinton's failures. But, as usual, the Leftwing Liberal Democrats believe the answer to all our economic woes is higher taxes. New, refreshing idea? Nope! There's nothing new about their stale ideas, but what I hope to see become truly new is a change in America's voting habits. I hope to see the majority of Americans voting the Leftwing Liberal/Demo- cratic Socialists out of office as soon as possible.

Marti Stapp Linder is currently a columnist for a site for writers under the Aegis of AOL and for anoither site for writers on theWWW. She is also a published poet and short story writer, as well as a guest editor and contributor to various newspapers and writers' publications in Texas, Nevada, and California.

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