It’s difficult to keep Bill Clinton out of the spotlight. Whether it was helping his wife, Hillary, campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States or, most recently, his decision to get back to work on the Clinton Foundation [1], which works around the world to diminish greenhouse gasses, pushing low-cost drugs for those suffering from HIV/AIDS and battling childhood obesity. He most recently made news for a recent six-day trip to Africa took him to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Liberia and Senegal.
interview [2] the most certain act in the fight against AIDS is to maintain monogamous relationships. The advice was seen as seen as ironic coming from a former President who was impeached [3] by the House of Representatives (and later acquitted by the Senate) for perjury and obstruction of justice involving an extra-marital affair he was having with a 22-year-old White House intern.
Speaking of politics, the former President later failed to admit [4]that Barack Obama was ready for the highest office of the United States. This has fueled reports that Clinton is still angry over Obama defeating Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States.
Win or lose, Obama will find himself most often compared to Bill Clinton, the country’s last Democratic President. In Israel, Aron’s Israel Peace Weblog [5] noticed something familiar when Obama recently sat down for an interview with the conservative paper, the Jerusalem Post [6].
No one in my quadrant of the political spectrum is ever going to be elected President. So my key criteria for a “good” President are: compassion, worldliness, intelligence and political savvy. Obama seems to have all of these in abundance. Although I don't agree with many of the details of his positions, the more I hear him speak the more impressed I am. He is the savviest and most intelligent politician the Democratic party has produced since Bill Clinton, and I mean that as a compliment. He may not be super progressive, but he seems to be on the correct side of the fence on all important issues. And the more I see him, the more I feel he has the same human empathy and care for people that Clinton did.
Finally, Clinton’s policies against Osama bin Laden have again made waves. Saisi Duni [7], from Kenya, reports that a new book by the journalist Lawrence Wright [8] claims that the U.S. military strikes to hoping to cripple the Al-Qaeda network in east Africa after the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [9] had the opposite effect.
The Clinton administration’s failure to strike back effectively in 1998 helped make it possible for al Qaeda to carry out the massive attacks on New York and Washington three years later, says the book titled The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright describes as “ineffectual†the US retaliation for the August 7, 1998, bombings of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Less than two weeks later, 13 cruise missiles were fired at a factory in Khartoum that the United States believed was being used to develop poison gas for use by al Qaeda. Simultaneously, 66 cruise missiles were launched from US warships in the Arabian Sea. Their targets were al Qaeda training camps near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The twin missile attacks were given the code name “Operation Infinite Reach.â€â€¨