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Bullets bounce off, facts won’t deter them. The Clinton Library has become the never ending story for the right and careless reporters, each supposidly new revelation stoking rage and generating acres of blog ink with insightful headlines on the order of “HMMMMM.”

And if possible, a Sandy Berger reference.

Further proof is the silence which has greeted a lengthy interview with the actual person in charge of all the Presidential Library’s archives. Assistant archivist for presidential libraries Sharon Fawcett spoke to The National Journal, and illuminated many of the myths that lay over the Clinton archives.

Result? Zippo in Technorati, until The New York Sun‘s Josh Gertstein wrote a piece claiming facts contradicted her professions of openness.

It’s a classic shape shifting story.

Headline: “2,600 Pages of Clinton Records Withheld”

– What? They are records of Clinton’s Administration, now held by the National Archives and being processed for release or not at the Clinton Library. You could say “Clinton Records” is headline shorthand, but they are not his possession. And it further’s the line that no matter the outrage, the answer is Clinton.

Who done it? Gerstein doesn’t know but chooses to lay it on Clinton’s designated paper flack catcher Bruce Lindsey. Lindsey is the person assigned to review documents for Clinton, as provided for in current law. And archives operates in part under a letter in which Clinton laid out areas he was concerned to review. Read down in the piece to where the Archives spokesperson says “Not all of those pages were closed by Mr. Lindsey, in fact, the National Archives does the first set of processing. … At least some of those materials were closed by our archivists.”

How big is the document universe and how slow is release at the Clinton Library? Fawcett’s numbers show that the Clinton is not out of line from the pattern for Ex Presidents.

In 2009 Archives’ ten people in Little Rock hope to go through a new 200,000 out of 118 million document pages in the Clinton Library. Archives has done 8 of the 43 million pages at the Reagan, 5.5 million of 34 million at the Bush Library.

And Clinton couldn’t put his papers out now if he wanted to.

“The Archives still has to conduct a review for other restrictive categories: for national security, for third-party privacy information. These records will be highly sought after when they come out, so we need to go through and redact phone numbers and Social Security numbers, and other information that could be damaging to a person’s personal privacy, so those are the kinds of things that slow down the process… that’s the kind of information that we go through page by page and look at.”

There is endless detail more in the interview, it isn’t the last word and I’m perfectly prepared to enjoy the Clinton Conspiracy when it’s proven, but until then the Unstoppables could take a rest.

But won’t.

British Conservatives Look Back in Anger

It ain’t just disgruntled Labour supporters in Britain who dislike the current US president.

British Conservative blogger Ian Dale has polled his largely Conservative readership on ranking US Presidents since World War II. It’s not a scientific poll, but even these hardened fans of the smack of firm government view Bush the Younger as a walking disaster.

The rankings:
Franklin D Roosevelt +67
Dwight Eisenhower +59
Harry Truman +53
Ronald Reagan +50
John F Kennedy +40
Bill Clinton + 20
George Bush Snr -4
Lyndon Johnson -19
Gerald Ford -20
Jimmy Carter -40
Richard Nixon -42
George W Bush -48

Proof that Conrad Black is not a crank?

We Got Ours

The Washington Post has returned once more to the Clinton Library, with a willfully obtuse roundup of the usual crimes:

Did You Know He Collected Arab Money?

Let us certify that fundraising for these entities is, was, and shall forever be a scandal and a shame upon the nation,

That said, the Post largely recycles The New York Sun’s three-year old discovery of names, nations and amounts.

Then it’s on to the Clinton as a campaign issue, and one strong voice:

“Obama has introduced legislation that would require disclosure of all contributions to presidential libraries, including Clinton’s, and Congress has actively debated such a proposal. Unlike campaign donations, money given to presidential libraries is often done with limited or no disclosure.”

True as far as it goes, but with enough information left out to bend reality. Obama is not alone in this. The House has passed a bill, as has the relevant Senate Committee after Republican quibling. In the end the Houses may split on this, as they have in the past. Obama’s support, while a fine thing, did pretty much jack to move the bill.

The Post revisits the greatest Clinton hits yesterday and today.

They resurrect the Louie Freeh’s tale that Clinton passed up asking the Saudis about the Khobar Towers investigation in order to hit them up for Library cash. But the Post itself reported that Freeh wasn’t at the meeting he claimed to have heard this at.

While dissing the Clinton Library for not disclosing donors, including the ever-festering wound that is Marc Rich, they paint the Bush Library as almost an open book by contrast:

“Except for a few donors who asked to remain anonymous, the Bush contributors have been named publicly, and the names of the largest among them are either chiseled into a wall or onto the bricks of a walkway at the library in Texas.”

One exception being the million dollars crazed Korean Holy Man, felon, and seer, the Reverand Sun Myung Moon funneled the Bush Library in secret.

At least it has pillars.

The prolonged negotiations with Southern Methodist University have had no public result, and a man needs a place for his junk.

The National Archives has rented this handsome warehouse outside Dallas for the interim Bush papers dumping ground, a holding action until the finished library opens, somewhere.

The warehouse lacks even the limited romance lent by Bush Senior and Bill Clinton’s initial locations, a bowling alley and a former car dealership.

Nearby neighbors include a Spirit Halloween Superstore, whose national sales for John Kerry masks outsell their Bush Mask.

That may not be a negative for Bush. The surprisingly life-like Cheney outsells him too.

“Here were two men, Reagan and Clark, a devout Protestant president and devout Catholic, who prayed together, and who spoke of what they together, in their personal code language, called “the DP”—the Divine Plan. ”

Reagan Biographer Interviews Himself On Reagan Aid Interviews, Satisfied With Answers

Paul Kengor has cranked out multiple books on Ronald Reagan and the lesser gods of the Presidency, leading to his latest effort, a biographer of former Reagan National Security Advisor William Clark.

On TownHall, Kengor is interviewed on the book by …. himself? “In this latest edition, the Center [on Vision & Values] interviews its own executive director, Dr. Paul Kengor.”

Kengor leads off with Reagan and arming Saddam. Why-ever would he ask Clark about this?

Those Reds. Kengor explains:

“It is commonly asserted, especially among the left, that the United States, and specifically the Reagan administration in the 1980s, “armed” Saddam Hussein. If you actually sit down and read the junk on the web on this, it is extremely sloppy and unreliable. Nonetheless, the charges persist and clearly are not going way.”

Kengor claims his story begins with Clark mentioning he received a pistol from Saddam at a January 1986 meeting. Clark was in Baghdad as an “unofficial” Reagan envoy [the best kind] after leaving the White House.

Raising at least two questions:

– how many clowns did Reagan send to Iraq

– did Rumsfeld get a pistol too?

Kengor was forced to dive into the junk:

“I explained that there was a kind of left-wing cottage industry dedicated to exposing the alleged Reagan conspiracy to arm Saddam in the 1980s, including to arm him with WMDs [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. This really confused him. He didn’t want to respond to something so baseless, and couldn’t believe anyone would level such a reckless charge. I told him I would demonstrate when we got to his office in town later that afternoon. When we got there, I did a Google search on “Reagan armed Saddam.” Clark was shocked at all the hits…For the record, Clark says: “We never armed Saddam. And to my knowledge, we certainly did not give him anything like WMD technology, or assist him in developing WMD.”…By the way, as I gained access to Clark’s private papers, I came across the minutes and memos from this meeting. Indeed, there was no mention whatsoever of weapons.”

Well, perhaps. The “charges,” sometimes called facts, are that the US bent every effort to see that Saddam’s invasion of Iran went unpunished. Much of this constructive engagement continued to unfold under the Bush administration in the late 80s, only to end badly.

“Enmeshed in a doomed courtship with Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration in 1989 and 1990 repeatedly frustrated its own criminal investigators and regulators examining Iraq’s role in a multibillion-dollar bank fraud scheme in Atlanta, interviews and internal Government documents say.”

“Some of the loans and credits directly funded Iraq’s purchase of weapons and weapons technology, according to the indictment. Federal prosecutors in Atlanta and Administration officials scattered throughout the Federal bureaucracy raised suspicions, but never proved, that loan money backed by the United States Government was diverted into weapons purchases. Other critics say that this misses the point because money is fungible and the loans would at least have freed up other Iraqi funds for arms purchases….Mr. Bush has made several public remarks that have been contradicted by internal documents. For example, he denied that the United States enhanced Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile capability, but one document showed that one week before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d was urgently warning that Iraq was secretly using American technology in its vast arms buildup.”

Kengor plunges ahead, determined to rebut the charges of web-based conspiracy theorists like Baker:

V&V: What was that support, and what was the Reagan administration’s objective with Saddam?

Kengor: We provided some quite helpful satellite imagery to Saddam. This was highly detailed photos of Iranian troop movements and tank columns and that kind of thing.

Saddam was impressed and deeply grateful for this assistance.

“A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program…The Pentagon’s battle damage assessments confirmed that Iraqi military commanders had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and were adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or suggested. Iran claimed that it suffered thousands of deaths from chemical weapons.”

Quite.