Posted on 10/16/2001 12:01:36 PM PDT by Liz
On top of all the other things I'm obliged to fret about nowadays -- anthrax in my morning mail, suitcase nukes, real pestilence and real plague -- now I find I must worry about Bill Clinton, too.
In case you've forgotten, he was the president of the United States, before and after one Mr. Bush or another. He had all sorts of clever nicknames, hatched and poll-tested for him by whole squadrons of political operatives -- "The Comeback Kid," "The Man from Hope," each sobriquet an eerie blend of Capra and Kafka.
He was cozy with a lot of folks in the press and Academe and Hollywood, and he became famous for having a kind of sex in the Oval Office, although according to official testimony under oath he was pretty sure it wasn't really sex at all.
According to a nice young woman named Meryl Gordon (I feel sure she must be a nice young woman, although, on the other hand, I could be utterly wrong on all counts), writing for "New York Metro," the former president is practically beside himself with angst because he finds that he is out of power at the very moment when events have conspired to create the conditions for greatness.
Like Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront," he coulda been a contender, if only -- if only. (Instead, alas, like Marlon Brando in real life, he finds himself reduced to a bloated irrelevancy.)
Think of the frustration: it must be an especially fiendish kind of torture. What with Americans dead by the thousands, and the nation at war, and mysterious packets of toxins popping up all over the place, and the nation locked in an ominous waiting game, and despite his own best efforts to thrust himself front and center, he really doesn't matter in the least. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
It is his own pain Mr. Clinton feels now, most deeply and most acutely. He has been robbed -- he seems so sure of this -- of the opportunity to demonstrate his brilliant grasp, his diplomatic genius, his healing touch, his inspired leadership (all those things he never had a chance to flourish before an admiring world during his eight years of unblemished peace and prosperity, from Waco to the Camp David meltdown, from Somalia to the USS Cole).
Poor man. It's an opportunity he is touchingly certain should have been his. It belonged to him by rights, and not to some Texas yokel who's never even been to a Renaissance Weekend or enjoyed an overnight with Barbra Streisand or been hailed as a sex object by left-feminist reporterettes.
According to Ms. Gordon, "The World Trade Center attacks have catapulted the former president -- who was just starting to mellow out and revel in his post-Oval Office life as a New Yorker, senatorial spouse, and money-making private citizen -- into the unfamiliar and frustrating role of action figure in search of action."
The passion of this action figure is tinged with gall, Ms. Gordon notes, with endearing sympathy. "Interviews with nearly a dozen Clinton confidants reveal a man struggling to find a way to be useful and worrying that his peace-and-prosperity presidency will be recast as a footnote to the Bush-family dynasty," she writes, adding, with an almost-audible sigh, "Right after the attacks, Clinton admitted to a friend that he wished, for the first time, to be back in the White House. And he couldn't resist bitterly telling an ally that if the FBI had spent as much time chasing terrorists as it had investigating his behavior, perhaps things would have played out differently."
Mind you, there's a sweet kind of forgetting, in that. (I suppose we must forgive him, though.) The Executive Branch rules the Justice Department, after all, just as the former president -- in theory, at least -- ruled his own appetites. There's a cornucopia of obvious retorts to Mr. Clinton's implication that the FBI robbed him of his Really Big Chance.
Still, it seems excessive (indeed almost cruel) to confront such a man, at such a moment, with anything so blunt and cold as a matter of fact. Here's a curiosity. After eight years of experiencing revulsion and alarm and an often-strident anger at this strange presidential stick-figure, this bizarre combination of noise, and shadow, and lethal vanity, I suddenly feel mostly pity. Weariness and pity.
This is a man who gazes on the corpses of his fellow-beings, his fellow-citizens -- thousands upon thousands of them -- and thinks of how miraculous it would have been, this cosmic horror, this flaring-up of the fires of Hell, if only it had happened in time for him.
This is a man who sees blood and terror and grief and war's devastation merely as a kind of glossy theatrical backdrop, dragged out by the clumsy stagehands of History too late to ornament his turn before the footlights.
This is a soul so small God Himself cannot perceive it without a magnifying glass.
LIAR. He made it plain he never wanted to leave the White House, ever. Had friends looking into ways he could stay. Even looked into overturning term limits. He's been quoted numerous tims saying he wanted to run for a third term. I want him and her to just shut up and go away.
WJC just refuses to accept the fact that it was his presidency that was illegitimate. He never received more than 49% of the popular vote in his two elections and he would've been a one-termer if the G.O.P. had ran a Conservative against him and not Dole.
Clinton's main problem is that he pathetically seeks broad, (no pun intended!), acceptance, of which he'll never have. He's from a dysfunctional, hick family, he's the 'kin with smarts that caught the greasy pig'. And you'd think for someone who was so "intelligent", he'd be exploring several different avenues of employment now. By the way, has he ever had a job outside of politics? (Even in his teens?)
The guy, like his wife, is an emotional and psychological mess.
But, but, but... the pressholes are the other 20%. They got to shove this garbage of the humanity into our faces daily!!! That what gets me.
That pest Perot's 13% of the vote got the Clintons in the first time and Dole's inept
campaign and his throwing conservatives off the ship got Clintons in the second time.
I'll say this much for the conniver Clinton's....they have effective enemies.
They have nothing else to do.....oh, I guess they forgot about Afghanistan,....
What a WONDERFUL quip! I love a turn of phrase that captures truth so perfectly!
A "legacy" that will live in infamy.
Liz, I think you've got it.
He has become totally irrelevant except for the infamous deeds he left behind.
May God deliver justice to him. There is nothing *I* could do that would satisfy enough....
.....everything........always......
He has become totally irrelevant except for the infamous deeds he left behind.
He didn't plan it this way obviously. But then evildoers never foresee the consequences of their actions.
........Franz Kafka and Frank Capra....
Clinton's become the paradigm Kafkaesque anti-hero brooding in dark passivity.....
Not exactly on the subject but in the latest Frank Capra bio,
t'was said no one in Hollowood (sic) guessed that he was a closet conservative.
That too. I don't disagree. You'll have to admit, Perot the Pest drew off all those Repub votes.
Thanks, it does help dosen't it.
In between living off the taxpayers as an elected official,
I think he once had a "job" as a teacher but it was short-lived.
BTW, he never owned a house in Ark. A real stable guy, eh?
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