why oh why oh why, billyboy, are you going out on this limb? It was an indefensible compromise at the time that directly contradicted a direct campaign promise to the LGBT voters. While, yes, better than the status quo, it's hardly spinnable as a Generally Good Thing. Straight soldiers are not held to a standard that prohibits them from discussing, displaying, and otherwise parading their pussy-related interests, so we have a separate-but-unequal policy, the only "upside" of which is it freely permits gays and lesbians to be shot at just as much as heteros. The obvious solution is simply to ensure that the code of military conduct is equally enforced against sexual aggression or harassment of any kind.

Sorry, bill. This doesn't help anyone.

Preseident BJ says:

"[Gay soldiers] would be free to live their lives;"

Then has the audacity to temper that ridiculous assertion, with the firther ridiculousness of defending the act of keeping soldiers closeted by saying:

"…as long as they didn't go marching in gay rights parades or go to gay bars in uniform–In uniform–and talk about it on duty, they would be all right."

Does this man–this draft dodger–have any decency what so ever?

iworked on Clinton campaign for 18 months in 91-92. Ihave notsupported Clintonsincehisfailed policyagainst GLBT,then let us notforget about DOMA, friends like the Clintons(HRC) who needs enemies.

I fear that this is a precursor of the kind of hairsplitting on the issue that we might see Hillary do…

What he should have said is that it was proposed too early in his admnistration, Sam Nunn stabbed him in the back, and he was forced to retreat. Sometimes, I wonder about him.

Gianpiero, you've hit it on the head: This IS what we can expect from Clinton II–this kind of obfuscating, word-twisting, and (as HC has demonstrated) demonizing and underhandedness. We've had 8 years of backstabbing intrigue in our politics; maybe it's time to try something different.

Bill Clinton.a brave statesman,his word is not only a support for his wife,but also a support for Gay soldiers,for human right.you will got more information about the discussion around the topic on gaysinglehunt.com

"and [not] talk about it on duty, they would be all right."

And that, right there, is the problem - you idiot! Do straight soldiers not talk about girlfriends/sex/dating/wives/kids on duty? Damn. I can't believe I used to respect this man.

My, my, my. How much time some are wasting rehashing the mistakes of the past. Technologically they're iPod Queens; politically they're still playing 8-track tapes. Let's be consistent and tear down all those memorials to Harvey Milk. After all, he, like She Devil Hillary Clinton, was a Barry Goldwater supporter.

DADTDP is particularly important to me as one of my best friends was the late Leonard Matlovich, whose suit against the Air Force in 1975 was the first to make antigay military policies a national issue, though he is perhaps better known so many years later for his epitaph: “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

Most experts on the current policy are affiliated with the overall marvelous group that was formed exclusively to overturn it and assist those who were victimized by it in the interim, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. In a 1998 [?] report, then SLDN co-executive directors Michelle Beneke and Dixon Osburn wrote, emphasis mine:

“The promises to stop asking, pursuits and harassment in 1993 were clear. General Colin Powell stated in 1993: ‘We will not witch hunt. We will not chase. We will not seek to learn orientation’. Senator Sam Nunn, former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, ‘I do not believe we should have sex squads prying into the private lives of our service members’. President Clinton pledged that the policy would provide for ‘a decent regard for the legitimate privacy and associational rights of all service members’. Then Senator, now Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, expressed a similar understanding of the policy when he asked then DoD General Counsel Jamie Gorelick whether the ‘small amount of privacy under the current policy was intended to prevent the military from prying into people's private lives’. Gorelick answered with a resounding ‘yes’.

The reason underlying continued violations of ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue’ is a lack of commitment from top military and civilian authorities. Military leaders have not communicated to the field the policy's limits to gay investigations or ITS INTENT TO END PRYING INTO SERVICE MEMBERS' PRIVATE LIVES. The lack of commitment is reflected by: (1) The absence of clear and thorough guidance or training on investigative limits; (2) heavy-handed and increasingly intrusive investigative tactics against suspected gays, including coercion and fishing expeditions; (3) no recourse or redress for service members asked, pursued or harassed; and (4) a lack of accountability for those who violate current policy. The result is a climate in many commands where ‘anything goes’ in the pursuit of suspected gay personnel.”

While there is reason to condemn the Clinton Administration for failure to correct this [and, strangest of all, he blows kisses to Colon [sic] Powell who, along with Nunn, led the opposition to Clinton's original plan to integrate out gays by Executive Order], the belief that Clinton could have won a showdown with Congress over creating the policy is nonsense. Similarly, the belief that DADTDP was, in itself, worse than preceding antigay military policies is willful ignorance.

According to the expert on their history, the late Allen Berube, between the beginning of WWII and the late 80s, some 100,000 gays and lesbians had been discharged—long before any of us had even heard of Bill Clinton. Neither do the highest NUMBER of discharges in any given year under DADTDP match the highest numbers in some years under earlier policies. PERCENTAGES in some years might be higher but such math is affected by a smaller overall military force.

Nevertheless, the larger point remains that ANY form of limitation on the admission and retention of out gays in the military will be abused for the same reasons they were a decade ago as reported by SLDN: institutional homophobia. And like statistics on gay bashing in the civilian community, expression of it can ebb and flow whenever the amount of public discussion of gay equality does, except, just as discharges themselves go down, when the military is strapped for bodies as they are now with Iraq.

But the ULTIMATE point is that rather than rehashing history, let alone rewriting it, we are all better served by paying attention to the fact that ALL Democratic candidates for President support DADTDP complete repeal and no viable Republican candidate does. Let us move on.

Thoughtful words, Michael, but the point is exactly that we SHOULD look at history, because that gives us the best indication of the future proclivities of the various actors. When, as you correctly point out, all Dems support the repeal of DADT, we need to look at the past performance of the candidates to make any distinction at all.

And the fact that in the 90s DADT was better than nothing is not really comforting beyond being marginally better than the status quo ante in some ways, and marginally worse in others (by strictly institutionalizing and formalizing a prohibition against homosexual soldiers from talking about and doing stuff straight soldiers are permitted — even encouraged– to talk about and do. It may have been the best that Bill could hope to accomplish, politically, but that doesn't make it anything to crow about. It's now recognized as a disaster, a dishonor, and a failure. Pretending it's anything else is the kind of revisionism that bill, and now hillary, is becoming quite good at doing.

"ALL Democratic candidates for President support DADTDP complete repeal and no viable Republican candidate does."

Right. And let us not forget that the wife of the president who handed DADTDP to US servicemen has defended her husband's decision to legalize the military's closet:

"Once again Hillary refuses to admit an obvious mistake. During the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, she said her husband's 'Don't Ask' policy was not a mistake and then she tried to rewrite history by spinning 'Don't Ask' as a 'first step' toward gays and lesbians openly serving in the military. Just like with the war on Iraq, Hillary still doesn't get it."

http://tinyurl.com/2uwnbh

So let's all remove our support from the wife of the man who leveled the punitive DADTDP upon gay military personnel and instead, vote for another candidate.

Nice to see you back, Frances.

To mistake the Clintons for progressives is like mistaking the planet Jupiter for a split pea. Essentially, the Clintons can't win- as demonstrated by the comments on this board- because their triangulating ways are now well recognized by progressive voters. On the other hand, conservatives never really bought their centrist crap, and regard them- all evidence to the contrary- as liberals. With distain from both sides, who's left to support them?

As abhorant as the the current tag team Clinton charge is, it may work. I don't give the American public a whole lot of credit for discerning even who they are really voting for. It was really pretty idiotic for Hillary to meet the charge that Bill was playing too heavily into her campaign by saying that it was no diifferent than Michele Obama supporting her husband–Hillarita is playing the femanism ticket so heavily as to decieve the voters with the card.
The fact is that we may get two Presidents for the price of one. About DADT the issue is about the claim that "it was not intended": Bill went to school, indeed lawschool and he knows that laws are ment to be interpreted as narrowly or as broadly as they are written to be interpreted. Those bills aren't just slopped together; this bill particularly says no more than to perpetuate the closet and you'll be ok-it literally says nothing. Bill is being dishonest about his intent with DADT -he's not that dumb. So maybe instead of one regular Reaganite president, we'll take our chance with two well honed psychopaths .

"Michael Bedwells" heartfelt apologia for DADT and the Clintons is like Leland Francis’, who actually claimed that DADT and DOMA were FAVORS the Clintons and the Democrats did for us. Leland adored the Clintons and would have defended them if they’d been caught pissing on the Declaration of Independence. Leland had to stop posting because of terminal embarrassment.

Both Michael and Leland are dead wrong on this question. Here’s the real history.

The authors of DADT were Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Sam Nunn of Georgia, unreconstructed Dixiecrats. Bill had made one of those famous Clinton promises, you know, the kind worth their weight in gold. He promised to end military discrimination but he upset the bigots and had to run as far and as fast as he could to escape being thought of as a ‘queer lover’. (Keep in mind he had to drag Monica along because she had a vice like grip on him - running couldn’t have been easy.) Clinton and Nunn, totally caved in to the coalition of cult leaders, bigoted military brass and Congressional Democrat and Republican bigots.

They enacted what is clearly and plainly a bigoted act. That’s why we oppose it, Michael, because it’s a bigoted law crafted by bigots and enacted by a huge bipartisan bigoted majority. GLBT soldiers have been killed and beaten because of the permissive bigotry of this law. The wretched post mortem excuse that the Democrats didn’t expect the military brass to be bigots is hopelessly unbelievable. DADT was a stab in the back from the same party that gave us NAFTA, deregulation, opposition to socialized medicine, union busting, and immigrant bashing. And let’s not forget DOMA, another deep back wound.

The claim that all the Democratic candidates for President are for repealing DADT doesn’t mean squat. Their party has been in power since 2006 and everything they’ve done about GLBT rights has been a betrayal. They joined with Republicans to gang rape ENDA, refused to repeal DOMA because they’re pigheadedly opposed to samesex marriage and conveniently let the Mathew Sheppard Hate Crimes Bill die so it wouldn’t be an issue in 2008. Nobody even bothers to ask them to repeal DOMA because we know that their tired Dixiecrat answern will be – “It’s a matter of State Rights. “ The last Dixiecrat who said that was George Wallace.

You say lets move on and I agree – let’s move AWAY from the parties of war, union busting and bigotry - the Democrats and Republicans are our proven enemies. We don’t need a President who supports the war, busts unions and snuggles up with bigots.

The way to move on is to move AWAY them and create our own fighting movement. UnitedENDA, the US Labor Party and the efforts of the AFL-CIO affiliated Coalition of Black Trade Unionists to promote independent black political actions are all steps in that direction. But sadly, they are not likely to break the stranglehold of the right wing Democrats and Republicans in 2008. That will begin in earnest when the Democrats start a new wave of betrayals after the elections. Then the splintering and fracturing of American political life will accelerate and we can politically move on, and over, the owners of the Democratic Party. It’ll be fun.

I never forgave Clinton for DADT and DOMA. I'll vote for Clinton only if she's on the national ticket.