Posted on 10/16/2001 3:48:11 PM PDT by Tom D.
A VIEW FROM HERE by deb weiss every tuesday
A Bloated Irrelevancy October 16, 2001
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.
All that preparation. And then he waited. . . and waited . . .and waited . . .and waited . . .and waited . . . AND THOSE DAMNED ARABS WOULDN'T OBLIGE HIM WITH A GOOD, WHOPPING TERRORIST ATTACK, NOT EVEN ANTHRAX IN THE NEW YORK SUBWAYS OR A BOMB UNDER THE CAPITOL BUILDING, which would have triggered the Special Executive Orders.
And now, after it's too late, this.
"This is a soul so small God Himself cannot perceive it without a magnifying glass."
Why does Deb feel she must worry about, or even pay attention to Clinton, Bush the First, Reagan or Carter? Most of the country has moved on leaving Clinton for the historians to review? Does anybody here still concern themselves with what Clinton thinks anymore?
Clinton has been the most investigated President in history. We have already spent sixty million on a investigation of him. He is now out of office and was well on his way to obscurity yet his enemies continue to talk about him with an almost bizarre obsession. History will make the final judgements on Clinton. Deb should devote her energies to something more relevant to the nation.
There is such a country its called Afghanistan. Travel arrangements might be a little difficult though?
If Imelda Marcos had been in the USA, would we not have sought to remove her from power nad to have her tried/convicted/jailed and stripped of her state sponsored income and benefits?
Well, Hillary and Bill are worse than Imelda and Ferdinad ever were - so why are we not immediately seeking the arrest and trial and conviction and stripping of state sponsorship for these traitorous, treasonous, criminal, illegfal, immoral bastar@s??
I want answers from our leaders, as the way I see it, Clintons have cost billions and caused death of thousands - how do we dare stand by as they flaunt their atrocities?
I thought "Weariness and pity" was good, but you definately hit it on the head!
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