My republican brother still blames Clinton.... how can I respond to his NAFTA arguement.?

[Yooperman]

My Brother looks for ways to justify his always voting republican. Just last week he was telling me how Obama has raised the debt more than any other president... So I showed him a graph with information from the Treasury Dept. showing that in fact the republicans from reagan on have raised the debt much more than the Dems....

Now he keeps throwing me the fact that it was Clinton that signed NAFTA and if he hadn't we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now. I explained to him .. he was right Clinton did sign the bill...and of all the things that Clinton did while in office .. that is the worst piece of legislation ever passed in my lifetime. All I can say is that it was a republican bill that he agreed to sign off on in exchange for other things that he wanted passed at the time.

Does anyone have a better rebuttal to his reasoning? I know it most likely is a lost cause with him ... but I would love to have a SIMPLE argument to throw back at him and shut him up once and for all about Clinton.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.

Peace

YM

[madfloridian]

1. You can't.

It's like when our party started pushing education "reform" harder than the other party ever did, it's like when our side put Social Security and Medicare on the table to be compromised.....you can not explain it because they took a powerful weapon out of our hands.

[xchrom]

3. +1

[DainBramaged]

2. Just say, I'm right you're wrong, Reagan was a closet Liberal

stand back when his head explodes.

[closeupready]

4. The ugly reality is that your brother is correct about NAFTA - there is no honest rebuttal.

nt

[teddy51]

6. Thats true, and Ross Perot sat on Larry King live and had the very discussion with

(then) VP Gore about how harmful NAFTA would be.

[arcane1]

5. He can blame Clinton for signing the bill instead of vetoing it

But it was congress who sent the bill to his desk.

If he blames Clinton but not congress, then he's simply an idiot.

[pampango]

7. Tell him that during his time at Oxford Clinton must have caught the "European disease"

which causes one to view continental "free trade" as a liberal policy. Of course if you mention Europe your brother leap to the "All Europeans are socialists so Clinton must have been one, too" conclusion.

[Fumesucker]

8. Clinton may have signed NAFTA but it was negotiated on GHW Bush's watch..

Tell him to put that in his bong and take a big hit.

[mod mom]

9. I blame Clinton too.

Repeal of Glass-Steagall, MFN status for China, Telecom Act of '96 etc. Of all my votes, it was my vote for him I most regret.

[Auggie]

10. This "mess" has been 30 years in the making...

NAFTA is a small part of it

[Jamastiene]

11. Well, if you want to be totally honest,

Clinton DID sign NAFTA, but you can also point out to him that one of the biggest mouths when it came to CAFTA and SAFTA was Robin Hayes of North Carolina, a Republican. He totally sold out the people in my district. He said up until the last minute that he would vote against CAFTA and SAFTA, then turned around and voted for it.

And before anyone starts in with some shit about we in the 8th district in NC somehow "deserved" what we got with a Republican Representative, please read about the unfair redistricting that happened in NC before Hayes. We ended up with Hayes "representing" a largely blue area of NC because of that shit the Republicans in NC pulled. They are doing it again this time too. One of the most liberal areas of NC gets screwed when they do redistricting, because they lump us in with damned Moore County and their rich ass right wing Republicans every single time.

The truth is, that, sadly, BOTH Democrats AND Republicans have screwed us over when it comes to NAFTA, CAFTA, and SAFTA. We are totally fucked because of all of those. Push comes to shove, the blame is equally distributed, when you look at the actual voting and which party voted how on it.

[JohnnyRingo]

12. Clinton was critisized by House Republicans for "taking the teeth" out of NAFTA.

The bill they originally drew up was filled with union busting provisions that included Mexican truck drivers having free reign to the nation's highways and held no trade restrictions for companies that denied human rights. The point is Republicans would have put NAFTA on steroids if they were still in office. Does your friend recall how GWB and Dennis Hastert passed CAFTA that extended the trade zone even further South?

People who forget Republicans authored NAFTA (George HW Bush signed the agreement on 12/17/92), must not recall the little Texan who split the party in '92 by warning of "that giant sucking sound as jobs flow South" during the debates. The barb was aimed at the incumbant Republican candidate that year.

[Bonhomme Richard]

13. Just got off the phone with my 67 year old repub brother and...

he supports OWS. He has had enough and it isn't about the money as he has plenty. It has to do with what's right and fairness.

[Enthusiast]

14. And Obama will be blamed for the new trade deals.

The President has the veto pen. "The buck stops here." But just as Clinton did with NAFTA, Obama is actually promoting the new free trade deals against the wishes of 90% of his party. But you are right, it was a Republican bill. So was Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

Democratic presidents need to start acting like Democrats. If they want to know how to act like a Democrat they need to study up on FDR.

Tell your brother that he is right, Clinton deserves blame for NAFTA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

This is what we get when Republicans masquerade as Democrats.

[defendandprotect]

15. Echo -- "You can't" -- Plus he overturned 60 years of Welfare guarantees ... with a nod from Gore!!

[gratuitous]

16. I think you covered it

However, if NAFTA (bad as it was, and the promised follow-up on labor and environmental side agreements never materialized) is the repository for everything bad going on now in the country, your brother has to willfully ignore scads and scads of Republican perfidy on other matters, as well as the active connivance by Republicans in making NAFTA as bad as it was and is (the aforementioned aborted side agreements).

[me b zola]

17. What I have done to deal with this in my life

...is to stop talking about politics and policy in terms of republican & democratic party affiliation. I speak in terms of conservative & progressive. I acknowledge screwed up policy when confronted with it, regardless of who implements it, but tie it to where it comes from and that has always been conservative policy.

[Zen Democrat]

18. GHWB was a big proponent of NAFTA. Had he been reelected it would still have passed.

He was the one who pushed in the first place.

[izquierdista]

19. Look at the vote

In the Senate it was 61-38 http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=103&session=1&vote=00395 Eight Republicans voted no, the other thirty were Democrats.

In the House, the Repubs were for it 132-43 and the Dems were 102 for and 156 against.

Looks to me like another example of a President being "bipartisan" by caving in and doing what the Republicans want, and his own party can go to hell. The vote would have been more lopsided, given that the White House probably twisted some arms to get Dems to vote 'yes". Had he actively come out against it, no way would it have passed. And if it did, a veto of it would never have been overridden.

Tell your brother it was people like him, the Republicans, that gave the country away.*


* While Bubba Clinton chuckled "yup, yup, whatever you say" from the sidelines.

[B Calm]

20. NAFTA was written by republicans, passed by 100% OF THE REPUBLICANS IN OFFICE

with the help of a handful of conservative dems and then signed into law by a democratic president> NAFTA has always been a republican free trade deal.