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.
Where was he after the USS Cole bombing. After the Khobar bombing?
After the Marine barracks bombing? After the 1993 WTC bombing?
Call your health care provider, the meds aren't working.
What a blatant lie - he has HATED every minute of being an IMPEACHED ex-president. He has NEVER stopped wanting to be back in the WH.
Lying piece of trash.
Thanks. I needed that.
But she overestimates Clinton (him). She concludes that he has "a soul so small that even God Nimself could not see it without a magnifying glass." That is too charitable.
He sold his soul, sometime in his never-ending teenaged years, for gratification and personal gain. His was a literal Faustian bargain. "Whst profiteth a man that he gain the world, and lose his soul?"
What indeed. We have a walking object lesson in this supremely self-centered, miserable excuse for a human being, Billyjeff Clinton. His back-channel plays for sympathy should be met with contempt, and nothing more.
As a FReeper wrote months ago, "I despised him then. I despise him now. I will despise him until he dies. And then I will despise his memory."
The (More er Less) Honorable Billybob,
cyberCongressman from Western Carolina
For a clear discussion of the difference between what the US can constitutionally do in wartime with aliens (but NOT with US citizens of foreign extraction), see my book, Manzanar, published in 1988.
Eventually, perhaps, it will. But not without Bubba doing something positive to resurrect his RQ (Respect Quotient).
Recall that Jimmy Carter left office in semi-disgrace. And Richard Nixon in several multiples of full disgrace. While Clinton didn't depart under similar circumstances, events have conspired to, indeed, reduce him to irrelevance. Contempible irrelevance, in fact.
At the moment, the healthiest attitude toward Clinton is to ignore him. But, for some perverse reason, he won't let us do that. Instead, he insists on injecting himself into the national dialogue. And, because of this, he warrants the dismissive treatment in Deb's column.
If the Schlickmeister would only sit down and shut up, we could safely ignore him. Then, if he figuratively chose to build homes for poor people (instead of, literally, a memorial for himself), we might eventually have the opportunity to re-evaluate and respect him.
Maybe...
What a blatant lie - he has HATED every minute of being an IMPEACHED ex-president.
He has NEVER stopped wanting to be back in the WH. Lying piece of trash.
That leaped out at me also. He's always changing his darn story.
He's a chameleon, changing his colors as the environment changes.
As a conservative, I haven't much liked the Democratic presidents in my lifetime but I have respected all but BS Clinton. There is nothing about him to respect. If he had done what he should have done when he was president, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
Without even discussing his perjury, his sexual harrassment/predatory behavior, his abuse of power, his suborning of perjury, his pathological lying, his sale of White House access, his sale of pardons,,,,
what kind of 'respect' does he deserve--as the first president to turn our nation's highest office, the Oval Office, into his very own PERSONAL MASSAGE PARLOR?
It's obvious to anyone (other than the most blinded Slick apologists) that his sole purpose in life was only his own political and personal 'self-aggrandizement'. I am truly thankful that he is not in office now to further those lofty goals!!!!! I am thankful that we now have as our Commander-in-Chief a good, honorable and decent man--something that will NEVER, EVER be said about Slick!!!
This is a soul so small God Himself cannot perceive it without a magnifying glass.
The two tastiest bits of a thoroughly delicious essay.
Guess that enlightens all of us!
ontariopcer, Go back to Ontario and respect that piece of socialist/commie trash who is posing as your prime minister!
If he'd have the grace to let the new President lead, we might be prone to not criticize him at least. But he keep popping up like one of those never-die monsters in a slasher movie. That's why we get paranoid. He won't leave us alone. I keep wanting to say, " Take that sourpuss of yours and go back in your cave."
He's a chameleon, changing his colors as the environment changes
Bill Bennett: "Clinton's virtue and belief are only incidents"
So true.
I was just about to say what a good writer you are.
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