History Texts Take Up Clinton Impeachment. For those who've often wondered how history -- and history classes -- would tell the story of Bill Clinton's impeachment, this article explains how it is currently developing:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/27/D8EOJKTG0.html

In a nutshell, texts generally avoid telling the lurid details of Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and instead focus on the relevance of Clinton's impeachment to recent history -- and I'm all for that. But one paragraph of this article makes me wonder how biased these texts are:

The impeachment is portrayed in the context of his two-term tenure, a milestone event, but not one that overshadows how Clinton handled the economy, crime and health care.

That is the only time the article mentions the "economy, crime, and health care" thing, so I'm not certain if that statement reflects the point of view of the article's author, or if it means that students are being taught in school that Clinton actually did good things in those areas. I'm afraid the latter may be the case. What did Clinton have to do with the economy, crime, and health care during his eight years in office?

The economy. The economy was strong during Bill Clinton's time in office, but it had nothing to do with Clinton's handling of the economy. The economy handled itself for those eight years. When Clinton ran for president in 1992, he told voters that America was suffering from "the worst economy in 50 years", and people who couldn't remember the '70's believed him. But it was far from true. The economy was recovering from a recession at the time, but it was a relatively short and mild one. It lasted from the fourth quarter of 1990 to the first quarter of 1991. That's two whole quarters, folks, the minimum amount of time for the definition of "recession" to fit. It was most definitely not the worst in 50 years, either; there were recessions in 1974 and 1982 that were far worse, and the years in between those were generally not boom times. At the time Clinton was making this "worst economy in 50 years" claim, the economy was already growing. The recession ended in April 1991, after the first Gulf war. Growth was slow after that, because that's the way economic cycles work. But (with the help of the liberal doom-and-gloom media), Clinton successfully convinced voters that they needed him to save them from another Great Depression. After Clinton won the election, the media suddenly began to report better economic news, and the not-yet-inaugurated governor of Arkansas took credit for it! Al Gore, Clinton's VP-to-be, claimed that the economy was growing because of "hope", because the people were now suddenly optimistic after he and Bill were elected. By the time of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, the economy had already been in turnaround for 21 months. During that supposedly horrible year of 1992, gross domestic product grew at robust quarterly rates of 3.9% to 4.5%; during Clinton's first three years, 1993-1995, quarterly growth went up and down like a yo-yo, ranging from 0.5% to 5.5%. Growth was especially sluggish in early 1995, as the effects of Clinton's tax increase were felt. Stronger growth prevailed for the next four or five years, but it was in spite of Clinton's policies, not because of them. In fact, the so-called "Bush recession" began in the third quarter of 2000, when Clinton was still in office -- and had been for seven-and-a-half years. (You can view a GDP growth chart here).

Crime. The crime rate did decline under Clinton, but that was due mainly to the work of big city mayors and state governors. The best example is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who turned the dreaded Big Apple into one of the country's safer cities. Clinton did sign a crime bill into law in 1994, but it was little more than a pork-barrel project. Its best remembered feature was midnight basketball -- which did little more than draw gangs to the games, where they committed more crimes.

Health care. Who can forget the attempt by Bill and Hillary Clinton to put the entire American health care system (about one-seventh of the U.S. economy) under government control? Bill and Hillary portrayed it as the ultimate act of compassion that would guarantee health care coverage to all Americans. But the plan, co-written by Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner, was a socialist nightmare that would have created enough new laws to make every American's head spin. The plan was over 1,300 pages in length, but those who managed to make it past page 900 discovered a little plan to make it illegal for people to choose their own doctors. Every American citizen would have been assigned to a mandatory government health alliance, and if you went to any other health alliance for your needs, there was a mandatory 15-year prison sentence to serve as punishment! People get less time than that for murder! I could just imagine if people didn't catch on to these things, and the plan had gone through. Clinton would have answered the outraged critics by saying: "It was in the plan! Everyone should have read the plan!" It would have been like a scene from The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy. When the American people did catch on to what was being snuck past them, the plan died a much-deserved death. In the 1994 mid-term elections, Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Many pundits interpreted this as the public's punishment for Clinton's health care plan. For the remaining six years of the Clinton presidency, the Clintons did little more for the health care industry than demonize it, driving down pharmaceutical stocks and taking the profit out of flu vaccines (which, of course, resulted in a shorter supply).

Man, I wish I had a hand in writing history textbooks!