More commentary from Real Clear Politics on Bill and Larry's love fest.
BILL AND LARRY: I only watched a few moments of Bill Clinton being interviewed by Larry King last night - not because I had something better to do but because I simply couldn't stomach the former President's self-congratulatory answers to almost every single question.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
KING: Should we stay with humans going into space?
CLINTON: I believe so. I gave the approval for the Israeli astronaut to go.
KING: Really? It started then.
CLINTON: And on the day that he went up, former Prime Minister Barak called and thanked me and reminded me that he and I had done this deal to allow this remarkable human being to go into space.
Could any other person take such a simple, general question about the US manned space flight program and turn it into a paean to himself?
Here's another:
And let me just say that, you mentioned Rwanda. One of the reasons there's a picture of me in a clinic in Rwanda with all these women nursing their newborns is they at least at this clinic have the medicine to stop mother to child transmission.
Thank God the world has been alerted to the fact there is a picture of Bill Clinton in an AIDS clinic somewhere in Rwanda!
Clinton's need for validation - especially as he watches his presidency shrink in comparison to George W. Bush's - is so palpable it's both amusing and frightening. You can feel Clinton trying to work the rhetorical eraser on history, smudging what's written just enough to diffuse culpability for the problems we now face on Iraq, al-Qaeda, and North Korea.
This isn't to say that Clinton and his administration are 100% responsible for the many dangerous situations America now faces in the world, only that it's obvious the former President feels his record needs defending. And it does.
UPDATE: Some quantitative proof of Clinton's egocentricity - if such a thing is even needed: A reader sends word he sifted through the Larry King transcript and found that Clinton used the personal pronoun "I" a whopping 197 times.
Charles Krauthammer made a similar point on Fox News last week contrasting Bush's speech memorializing the Columbia astronauts (one mention of the word "I" in the entire speech) with Clinton's speech in Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing (eleven mentions of "I" and three mentions of "Hillary and I"). Link
Bringing this pic over, it jogged a terrible memory.
At the "end" of the war in Kosovo clintoon and halfbright went to one of the refugee camps. Most of the people and children were just milling around and a few were interacting with bill and maddy. Then came time for the photo op so bill and maddy start to round up the refugees. Not many smiles, especially on the children who were made to hold up poster boards that spelled out clinton and stand in front of him and maddy.
I really got sick when bill and maddy started putting their arms around the children and tried to act like they cared. Children are very perceptive, they knew what kind of people bill and maddy are and it showed on their faces.
Could also have been these muslims understood they had to appear grateful, as much as they could stomach, to the infidels they hate but did help them defeat their enemy.