Dinsdale wrote:Every now and then, the denizens of this board are treated to a truly great example of a KYOA. Not the minor versions, but a full-on broke-his-knee-swinging-it-so-hard-at-his-posterior.
And we've just had one:
Terry in Crapchester wrote:Nice try at historical revisionism. The chronic unemployment started due to the policies of your boy, W.
Yup -- first, he goes to the "historical revisionism" card...
and follows it with an absolute, complete rewrite of history.
Uhm, Terry -- care to remind us all whose signature (after screaming from the mountaintops to push it through, despite the vast majority of Americans being strongly opposed) appears on the NAFTA and WTO acts of treason?
There's a "W" on there alright, but it's the first initial, not the middle initial.
W The Buttlicker certainly had his chance to fix it, and didn't. It's been a true bipatisan effort to kill American jobs...
But you might wanna crack a history book, since your memory seems to fail you (even though it's been within the last 15 years).
"Historical revisionism," indeed... aka "bald-faced lying."
Uhhh, Dins, you do know that there was a side agreement to protect labor attached to NAFTA, don't you? And that it was subsequently weakened by a Republican Congress? Remember that?
The 105th Congress reported two bills to extend this authority, which also would have limited somewhat the authority of the President to include worker rights (and environmental) provisions in future trade agreements.
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/6211.pdf
And since you're railing about NAFTA, you do know that it wasn't Clinton who started the negotiations on NAFTA, don't you? It was W's father, and he mentioned NAFTA rather prominently during the 1992 campaign (Clinton, by contrast, tread rather lightly on that subject).
Now, if you want to argue that NAALC didn't go far enough in protecting worker rights (since compliance was mostly voluntary), you'll get no argument from me in that regard. But subsequently weakening the President's authority to protect those rights certainly was not the right way to correct that particular problem.
As for the 2008 financial meltdown, NAFTA was hardly the only culprit. Of course, Clinton had a hand in some of the other factors as well, but those factors, by and large, were more heavily supported by Republicans than by members of Clinton's own party (e.g., repeal of Glass-Steagall). Clinton's Presidency was largely driven by the Republican agenda, to which his response was too often, "me too, but not as much."
