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I didn't see the interview so didn't know that Clinton was forewarned. I still don't think it matters. I don't think this interview advances our national interests since Clinton, as president, was indifferent to our national interests and ignorant of the peril in which this indifference placed us.

He has nothing to contribute to the history of his time in office and out except his failure to understand the duties of the presidency. His lashing out in blind fury at even the intimation of failure will not even be a footnote in the history of this tumultuous time.

For Clinton it has always been all about Clinton, his image, his legacy, his bottomless neediness. The horror of Clinton as president, is that this country served as a backdrop for the Clinton soap opera; we, the citizens, became the chorus, the adoring audience and those of us who demurred were vilified and silenced. The media crawled into the gutter for him, and our enemies judged us by watching this sordid fairy-tale, then struck.

I think that we learned that a president cannot be a diva, that the grown-up business of protecting and defending our future cannot be subordinated to the personal psychodrama of an infantile climber who cheapened the perquisites of power even as he exploited them.

Clinton remarked of the presidency, "It's just a job." If he really believes this, then his failure to understand the immense power of the office and the terrible burden of exercising that power led inexorably to September 11, and he must know this, even as he writhes and snarls when he is reminded of it.

I think that he and his detestable wife represent the worst of our system. They are greedy, conscienceless, vulgar, impudent, and lacking the humility necessary for those who seek to exercise power in this system. Except for his pathetic bragging about his rich friends, he has nothing to add to the great questions of the day, nor does he have the understanding of even himself, to proffer answers.

Clinton was not only disengaged from the responsibilities of the presidency, he was, and is, disengaged from himself. Now old, ill, with the horror of the waste that was his life perhaps dawning on him, he haunts our tv screens, seeking, no, demanding that we affirm his lies, even as the images of Americans hurtling through space racing their reflections in the glass towers, down to the streets of New York City haunt our dreams.

I don't feel sorry for Clinton. I think the main reason we turn our eyes away from bear-baiting is to avoid the temptation to forget, in our glee at the bear's impotent rage, that the bear caused the deaths of people we knew, the young man whose senior prep pianoforte performance of Bach we taped but cannot bring ourselves to listen to, the young blonde dancer/lawyer/writer we all loved and still miss, and that the bear almost destroyed our village.

"Clinton was not only disengaged from the responsibilities of the presidency, he was, and is, disengaged from himself."

Your entire analysis is wonderful.

Though Clinton was disengaged from everything but carnal lust, his ambitious, power hungry wife was not. It was the rapacious Mrs. Clinton who ran the WH, who - through FBI files - ran government and foreign policy decisions.

Mrs. Clinton declared herself co-president; Mr. clinton did not refute this.

It was Mrs. Clinton who tried to depose Gore's official status with attempts to move his WH office.

Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton was dangerous to our nation's security and societal norms then and she remains dangerous, no matter political machinations to the "center." She has no center.