Category: Politics

Right around the time Clinton left office, I was at my father-in-law’s house on the Eastern Shore, flipping through the cable channels. (We don’t pay for our TV viewing, so it’s a small pleasure when I can do that.) An ad for a video caught my eye, with the title “Funniest Presidential Moments” or something like that. There was one scene with President Clinton and Boris Yeltsin are laughing at an off-camera incident. Both of them are roaring with mirth.
It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen Clinton in an unselfconscious moment. He always seemed to be looking around at who was watching him, playing to the crowd, giving people what they wanted to hear. But here he saw an incident and laughed at it, not to get on someone’s good side, but merely because it was funny.
Then a subsequent thought hit me: since early 1992, when he first became nationally known, I had never thought of Bill Clinton as anything other than a fraud. There have been other politicians I have loathed for their politics, but I could concede that at least on one or two issues, they really believed what they said, or they had some trait that humanized them.
Clinton is all appetite, as Jesse Jackson once remarked. He was, and is, driven by his emotional needs and sexual desires, which are probably indistinguishable. His soul is a black hole for adulation, which he craves like a narcotic. Anything he gives, he gives only in the expectation of getting.
It would be difficult to think of a more perfect narcissist — his life and career were completely ordered toward maximizing his own self-importance. He never sacrificed for others, but asked others to make great sacrifices for him. Many of them did: Susan McDougal went to jail to avoid implicating him in a crooked real-estate deal. The feminists destroyed their own movement when they defended his abuse of power. (Who can possibly take them seriously about sexual harassment, or anything else?) Congressional Democrats went from a majority to a minority because of Clinton, yet they issued teeth-bared defenses of him when he was impeached.
So who are these two million people buying Clinton’s new book? Presidential memoirs are a dreary sub-genre, even for presidents like Reagan who knew how to express themselves. For a known liar and slight-of-hand artist like Clinton, who never expresses his own mind without doing the political calculations, why would anyone care to buy it?
The best explanation I can provide is that for the Bush-haters, it’s a demonstration of their contempt for the current president. I can’t imagine more than a tenth of the buyers will be able to plow their way through almost 1,000 pages of preening. His book might have been interesting in 20 years, after time has worn down his body and his partner has left the Senate.
According to the reviews I’ve read, such as the AP’s, “It’s like being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946.” If someone else wants to read it and post their thoughts, by all means, and I salute your bravery and tenacity.

[Warning: Harsh Blog Commentary Follows — Not suitable for mothers, young ladies and children]
With apologies to GWAR…
It’s not your imagination and it’s not a bad trippy,
yes, that’s right, it’s Michael Moore the hippy
As some of you might be aware, there’s a federal election going on in Canada right now. And guess what? The Conservative Party is winning. The reason for this is simple: Canadians like myself who take their religion seriously are sick and tired of having the Liberal goverment (assisted by the socialist NDP) shove the homosexual agenda down our throats.
Michael Moore is not happy about the rise of the Conservative Party of Canada in the polls. So he recently made his way to Toronto where, with all the arrogance of an American imperialist, he warned Canadians against voting for the Conservative Party of Canada.
Michael, I’ve spent the past four years living in the United States. Most Americans I have met are warm and hospitable people. These are memories that I will take with me when I move back to Canada next week to pursue my doctorate. You, however, are the exception to my otherwise positive experience of Americans. In fact, with your smug paternalistic attitude YOU — and not President Bush — are the stereotypical ugly American that the rest of the world complains about. You’re obnoxious, you’re condescending and you’re also fat from eating too much junk food.
We Canadians know how we will vote in the next election. Our votes are not about to change because some journalistic equivalent to masturbation (your entire shtick, in my opinion, is about Michael Moore — nobody else — so you don’t even have enough credibility to be dismissed as a hack) orders us to do otherwise.
Michael Moore, go home! You’ve made a big enough nuissance of yourself in your own country. Leave Canadians alone…

A reality check on Kerry’s fantastic promises for his first 100 days in office.

Whoops — sorry, by “anti-abortion” I meant “environmentalist,” and by “abortion clinics” I meant “houses and cars.” Apparently, radically anti-human environmentalists have been destroying property they don’t like and endangering other peoples’ lives. Their targets are new housing developments and SUVs.
We await the following:

• Reporters asking the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation, and other non-violent environmentalist groups if they repudiate these domestic terrorists;
• Reporters asking John Kerry and other prominent Democrats if they think the Earth Liberation Front is a legitimate political organization; and
• Reporters grilling environmentalists about whether they are sincere about their beliefs — because after all, if you oppose suburban land growth and big vehicles, you must necessarily use violence to destroy those threats, as surely as night follows day.

I wonder if there will be a ratio of about 1,000 news stories for each SUV destroyed, the way there was about that many stories for each abortion clinic bombed and abortionist murdered.
(Thanks to an anonymous friend of Catholic Light who brought this to our attention.

foxnews.com – 9/11 Panel: No Evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq Link

But over at newsmax.com we find the following:

“Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq,” says the Commission.
Such a statement begs the question: Why does the Commission, let alone the press, take the word of two senior bin Laden associates over, say, Iraq’s new prime minister, Iyad Allawi.
Last December he told the London Telegraph, “We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda.”
Reacting to the discovery of an Iraqi intelligence document placing 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Baghdad two months before the attacks, he continued:
“This is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks.”