Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Stone Blumenthalis an American journalist, activist, writer and former political aide. He is a former aide to President Bill Clinton; a long-time confidant to Hillary Clinton; and a journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy. He was editor of several departments and wrote for several publications including The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. After 2000, he published several essays critical of the administration of President George W. Bush...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth6 November 1948
CountryUnited States of America
We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.
The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.
Clinton took very tough decisions on the economy.
But presidents matter. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned being in the White House.
Clinton was a president who used his office, in creative ways, to try to reinvigorate the federal government to benefit the majority.
Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.
On the contrary, it might even be a projection of what the truth is of the Bush Administration's complacency and ineptitude on the terrorism in its first 9 months in office.
The attack on Clinton on terrorism is entirely politically inspired by the right-wing of the Republicans, and has no basis in fact whatsoever.
Clinton was very early on aware of the problem of international terrorism.
It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
Every decision that they take has enormous consequences, and ripple out from the White House.
Dick Clarke, who was head of counter-terrorism in the National Security Council, pushed constantly for the Principals Committee, which is the key national security group of top officials to take up the issue of terrorism.
The biggest mistakes, early on, involved foreign policy and involved the strategy for health care.
At the same time, Clinton was doing a lot things right, like the economy.