Mr Huston, your dishonest partisanship is getting both tiresome and very transparent.

Bill Clinton, as you admit, comes from a right-to-work state, and as President was never the guy the unions really wanted – but they tolerated him, and he tolerated them, because on both sides the alternative was far worse. Unions do, generally, support Democrats. Your idea that they do so for corrupt reasons is simply nonsense, and based on what some – a few – unions were like in the 1950s before Bobby Kennedy – a Democrat – forced them to clean up. Utility company executives, as a group, are loyal Republican contributors and voters. Is that a corrupt relationship? if it is in your view, then condemn it. If in your view, it is not corrupt, then stop being such a vicious hypocrite.

And as for Clinton's budget policies, it is true that the Republican majority in the House forced Clinton to do things he might not otherwise have done, but Clinton was always more of a budget hawk than Republicans gave him credit for – which was why the liberal side of the party did not trust him much, and it is undeniably true that the mechanics of budget control – pay as you go – 0-based agency budget review for every budget cycle – brought the federal budget closer to structural balance than any budgets since the Depression. It was perhaps Clinton's (with lots of help from Robert Rubin) single most laudable acoomplishment, and Bush's abandonment of Clinton's policies was probably the singe worst act of a general failed Presidency. Your attempt to revise that history also fails – and for the usual reason – you are ignorant of history and a shameless distorter of what selected facts you manage to learn.