- "She's smart"...he's "brilliant...."
- --Susan Estrich, Get the Clintons Off the Stage
Pul--eeese.
Susan Estrich is smart enough to know better...
Less patronization than self-preservation, I suspect.
"I have no infrastructure to deal with this." bill clinton One of the unintended consequences of America's rejection of mandated political correctness is that legends crumble. The classic case is that of Bill Clinton. The conventional wisdom has been (even from his critics) that notwithstanding policy and philosophy disagreements Bill Clinton was/is a smart, charming, even brilliant man. The reality that is becoming increasingly clear to those willing to see is that "The President Clinton Package" and his team of advisers, managers, and spin doctors, were smart, charming and at times brilliant. However, left to his own devices and without the support, advice, counsel and coercive powers of office, Bill is (for the second time in two months) emphatically demonstrating he ain't all that smart. Bill's big yap:
Geoff Metcalf slams Clinton's foot-in-mouth sophistry
PUFFY-faced polemicist Christopher "Hellbound" Hitchens claims Bill Clinton is a "lousy crook." ... He rips into jokes about President Bush's intellect as "another liberal snig that annoys me a lot these days," adding, "The fact has to be faced: the intellectual candlepower of this administration is a great deal brighter than the Clinton administration . . . [and] the level of professionalism is very much higher." HALF A HOUSE, HALF A BRAIN: Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy by Mia T John Podhoretz recently asked, "Whence comes hillary clinton's reputation for brilliance?" For the answer, he intuitively, rather brilliantly in fact, looked to her anatomy and noted,"This isn't the first time she's shot herself in the foot." The above anatomical analysis supports the Podhoretz thesis. Notwithstanding The Pod's erroneous conclusions concerning Ian Hunter recently observed that our leaders are shrinking. "From a Churchill (or, for that matter, a Margaret Thatcher) to a Tony Blair; from Eisenhower to Clinton; from Diefenbaker to Joe Clark; from Trudeau to Chretien -- we seem destined to be governed by pygmies." The pols understand their anatomical limitations well; they attempt to mitigate them with veneer. And so we suffer mindless alpha-beta-beelzebubba grotesquerie. . . With all the media genuflecting before the press-conference podium of bill clinton, it bears remarking yet again that the clinton intellect (an oxymoron even more jarring than AlGoreRhythm and meant to encompass the cognitive ability of both clintons) is remarkable only for its utter ordinariness, its lack of creative spark, its lack of analytic precision, its lack of depth. The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains. Politicos and reporters are not rocket scientists . . . Professions tend to be self-selected, intellectually homogeneous subgroups of Homo sapiens. Great intellects (especially these days) do not generally gravitate towards careers in the media or politics. Mediocre, power-obsessed types with poor self-images do. Thus, clinton mediocrity goes undetected primarily because of media mediocrity. ("Mediocrity" and "media" don't come from the same Latin root (medius) for no reason.) Insofar as the clintons are concerned, the media confuse form with substance, smoothness with coherence, data-spewing with ratiocination, pre-programmed recitation with real-time analysis, an idiosyncratic degeneracy with creativity. Jimmy Breslin agrees. In Hillary Is the 'Me-First' Lady, Breslin laments: Listen carefully to the clintons. You will hear a shallow parody of the class president. Not only do they say nothing; they say nothing with superfluous ineloquence. Their speeches are sophomoric, shopworn, shallow, specious. Platitudinous pandering piled atop p.c. cliché In seven years, they have, collectively, uttered not one memorable word save, "It was a vast right-wing conspiracy," "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,"and, "It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." Even the clintons' attempts at alliteration fall flat. Compare Agnew's (Safire's) "nattering nabobs of negativism" with clinton's "preachers of pessimism," an impotent, one-dimensional, plagiaristic echo (its apt self-descriptiveness notwithstanding). Before they destroy their backs along with their reputations, media gentry genuflecting at the altar of the clinton brain should consider Edith Efron's, Can the President Think? A wasted brain is a terrible thing.
A '68 Mustang is not exculpatory
Why we were compelled to hit on Simon & Schuster, our personal agitprop & money-laundering machine)
hillary clinton's heart and nerve, he basically has it right. Anatomy is destiny...
hillary's head revisited:
hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) IIby Mia T The smartest woman in the world would relish "the raucous give and take of American democracy, " as Charles Kuralt once put it.
hillary clinton, by contrast, subsists on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind...
In her new book, Political Fictions, Joan Didion indicts the fakery of access journalism practiced by vacant politicos like the clintons, whom she sees as "purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news."
(More Didion: "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.")
- THE HILLARY, YOU KNOW, CLINTON TRANSCRIPT:
Analyzed and Annotated-
by Mia T
January 22, 2002
- THE HILLARY, YOU KNOW, CLINTON TRANSCRIPT:
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE [YOU KNOW] 'UPDATED'
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Background: Using internal polling, the clinton 'infrastructure' determined that its cozy-clintonoid-interviews-of-the-Colmes/King-kind-scheme is no longer working. The scheme, which successfully shepherded and shielded the vacuous, inept, corrupt clintons for nine years, is now, post-9/11, yielding diminishing returns--and worse--increasing ridicule. Hence, we had the clinton 'infrastructure' interviewer recalculation last week that specified more interviewer gravitas...and less lapdog...but not more doggedness...that is to say...that specified Jeff Greenfield. A miscalculation, as it turned out. Greenfield made up in contempt what he lacked in inexorability. Although he conducted the entire interview circumambulating on eggshells, Greenfield did eventually ask the hard-boiled questions... ASIDE: The tough questioning was followed by Greenfield's sudden, post-interview departure from CNN, a development which will only further reinforce cozy-clintonoid-interviews-of-the-Colmes/King-kind 4th-estate malfeasance. Analysis: Greenfield's circuitous path to clinton depravity and failure necessitates a nonlinear analysis of the data; we will use a (nonlinear) least squares curve fitter. Proportional hazards political survival regression analysis will generate a political survival curve for hillary clinton, which will show her viability (so to speak) over time. Political survival time is defined as the length of the interval between the initial political trial balloon and political moribundity. Political moribundity is defined as two consecutive political failures--(one in the case of 9/11), or three not-necessarily-consecutive boo-filled public appearances, or one instance of a serious proposal generating laughter. ASIDE: Since by any of these standards, hillary clinton is already flatlined, the more interesting question for this analysis would be: "What the hell is this moribund loser doing in the political arena, anyway?" Survival is influenced by one or more factors, called "predictors" or "covariates", which may be categorical (such as the quality of 'infrastructure') or continuous (such as intellect or eloquence or character). Results:
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GREENFIELD: Tonight, a conversation with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the nation and the world after September 11, on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.
THE COMPLETE ANNOTATED INTERVIEW (NB: a very long, you know, download because of the, you know, clinton criminal, you know, redundancy.)
Democratic Party's Problem Transcends Its Anti-War Contingent