newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MICHAEL HAYNE

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

The man who cut welfare rolls, created surpluses, and presided over the greatest period of economic prosperity like never before came out swinging in support of President Obama. Most importantly, former President Clinton loudly and eloquently debunked every single phenomenally, breathtakingly outlandish myth that Obama is somehow a divisive leader who refuses to work with Republicans. After all, if anyone knows how to get into the mind of Republicans and get things done with them, it’s Bill Clinton.

Here was Bill Clinton on some on that weird and dirty little phrase previously known as rational republicans.

Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats. After all, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to my home state to integrate Little Rock Central High and built the interstate highway system. And as governor, I worked with President Reagan on welfare reform and with President George H.W. Bush on national education goals.” (ABC)

The former president began this tale by stating how President Obama not only selected former Bush advisors and Republicans to serve in his administration, but he even selected Hillary Clinton.

“He appointed Republican Secretaries of Defense, the Army and Transportation. He appointed a Vice President who ran against him in 2008, and trusted him to oversee the successful end of the war in Iraq and the implementation of the recovery act. And Joe Biden did a great job with both. He appointed Cabinet members who supported Hillary in the primaries.” Adding, “Heck, he even appointed Hillary!” said Clinton, on the very fact that Obama was so willing to work across the aisle and extend an olive branch that he selected his former arch Democratic Primary rival to be his Secretary of State.

And while we’re all ensnared in a massive “I Love the 90s” moment, Bill Clinton was very much like the T1000 from Terminator 2; he smoothly and seemly morphed into the mind of a Republican in order to execute all of his accomplishments in what is sometimes notoriously referred to as "triangulation." In a time long, long ago in a galaxy long, long away Republicans were actually sensible people with fully functional cerebral cortexes. Sure they would disagree on the size and scope of government and quibble on the way in which to carry out effective policy, but they were able to do so without calling the president a secret Muslim socialist and demanding to see his birth certificate over and over and over again. We now live in a political climate where our Congress was hijacked by group of deranged fanatics and fiscal terrorists, whose memory of the sprawling government under Bush is about as active as Chris Christie’s workout regimen.

In short, the 42nd President of the United States beautifully encapsulated how Obama has consistently extended the olive branch to Republicans and they have proudly taken that branch, ripped it up into a million pieces, stomped it into the sand and buried their heads with it so that the economic worsened and they could easily say “vote Republican” in 2012.

Michael Hayne is a comedian/VO artist/Columnist extraordinaire. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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