Mark Steyn doing his usual GREAT stuff!Mark Steyn: The Wrong Way to Mount Rushmore
Excerpt:
The Clintons are in New Zealand and finally get to meet "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for."
Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. I mentioned this in Britain's Sunday Telegraph eight years ago this very week, after this little story was trotted out the first time, but like so many curious anomalies in the Clinton record, it somehow cruises on indestructibly. By the time Sir Edmund shuffles off this mortal coil, the New York Times headline will read: "Man for Whom President Rodham Named Dies; Climbed Everest in 1947."
"My Life" (Knopf, 957 pages, $35) is a harder slog. The foothills of the vast tome are deceptively easy, when Mr. Clinton is merely telling a heartwarming personal anecdote about every single person listed in the Arkansas telephone directory between 1946 and 1992. But in the higher elevations after page 700, it's heavier going: Up in the clouds, way above the out-of-his-tree line, the president advances the theory that he was obliged to submit to random sexual advances in order to uphold the important constitutional principle that Republicans are uptight about oral sex. I think I've got that right, but by then I was finding it hard to breathe and beginning to see double.
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