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Christopher Hitchens on how we haven't seen the back of the Clintons yet
mirror.co.uk ^ | 5/06/2008 | Christopher Hitchens

Posted on 06/05/2008 8:15:54 AM PDT by neverdem

I have detested the Clintons ever since I covered the New Hampshire primary in 1992. The man I saw was not the silver-tongued charmer who seems to have bewitched so many people.

Up close, he seemed like a red-cheeked, piggy-eyed bully with a mean streak a mile wide.

And when he lied - which he more or less did for a living - he had a hard-faced little spouse to step into the TV studios to cover up for him.

This woman put up with A LOT from Bill over the years but could always tell herself it was worth it because in the long run the experience would give her the presidency she so obviously deserved.

Advertisement Over the years I watched this gruesome drama - the Clintons using and abusing the democratic process as marital therapy - until, the morning after this year's Iowa caucuses, it finally seemed to be over.

A good friend of mine wrote an exultant article saying Barack Obama had done us the huge favour of moving America into a "post-Clinton" era.

No more would the happy couple be able to inflict themselves on us. We were free from Lanny Davis and Harold Ickes and Howard Wolfson and Hillary's ghastly brothers and all the easy money riff-raff who had benefited from Clinton's last minute pardons.

As I read it I was hit with the queasy realisation I didn't believe a word of it. My friend Congressman Steve Cohen was forced to apologise the other day for comparing the former First Lady to Glenn Close rising from the bathtub in Fatal Attraction.

It's actually been more like a movie about an unkillable swamp creature or lagoon dweller.

And the morning after the last two primaries Lanny Davis was circulating a petition in the Democratic party to attach her to the Obama ticket.

"Good grief," I found myself muttering. "Is there no end to this woman and her overweening ambition?"

Well, THAT was a dumb question and no mistake.

Her performance in New York on Tuesday night was positively flabbergasting. Having won South Dakota, she congratulated that state on having "the last word"- while Montana's results were still being counted.

She congratulated Mr Obama all right but not for having won by securing the majority of delegates.

She let it be known that she would accept the vice presidential nomination without ceasing to count herself a candidate for the Presidential one.

And she demanded - wait for it - "respect" for the 18 million people who had voted for her. In other words, unless she gets a great deal of care and feeding and pampering, 18 million Americans will have been dissed.

The nerve. The nerve is really quite something.

In Washington yesterday, at the same pro-Israel podium at which Mr Obama spoke earlier, Mrs Clinton spoke of the man who has un precedentedly won the nomination as if he was just another Senator, like her, just another friend of Israel, like her.

There was a time one might have expected a Jewish audience to be asked to applaud the choice of the first black American nominee but Mrs Clinton couldn't find it in herself to be quite that gracious.

Indeed, if any one thing has exposed the hollowness and rottenness of the Clintons it is the almost casual way they have ignored their old black friends and allies to pursue a Clintonian version of a white backlash "southern strategy". Nothing is excluded if it serves the cause of the great entitlement.

From 16 years of polemics against this dynasty, I had acquired a huge shelf of anti-Clinton books and even written one myself in an effort to get the poison out of my system. For about 10 seconds after Iowa I thought of tossing them out. But now I think I'll have to hold on to my arsenal. I shall be needing it again.

Perhaps it's a Jaws-type movie I'm trying to think of. Like a Great White Shark, Mrs Clinton will never stop her relentless predations until the very end.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 2008; hitchens; theclintons
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To: neverdem

http://mediamatters.org/items/200803050006

SCARBOROUGH: Are you calling — are you calling Obama a shallow and flaky candidate? Do you —

HITCHENS: I’ve repeatedly called him a shallow and flaky candidate, and — though I thought he was an incredibly successful shallow and flaky candidate. I would add other things that are going to now get a second look that they’ve long deserved: this dumb, nasty, ethnic, rock ‘n’ roll, racist church that he goes to in Chicago, that’s going to — he won’t be able to walk away from that anymore. The crummy associates he’s got in Illinois, going on trial for corruption with their Iraqi friends. None of this is going to get the free ride from the press that it was getting until about this time yesterday morning.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.


21 posted on 06/05/2008 8:33:56 AM PDT by iowamark
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To: Ceoman
Where are you listening to Imus on the radio?

Imus has his show based out of WABC. In Boston its on 96.9. It's also on the RFD cable channel.

22 posted on 06/05/2008 8:34:04 AM PDT by AU72
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To: Aria
She won't be gone until a wooden stake is driven completely through her, impaling her six feet below drainage.
23 posted on 06/05/2008 8:35:27 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks
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To: neverdem
Ah, the Hitch is at it again. One of the few Liberals, along with Lieberman, that I can stomach...Christopher was uncharacteristically kind not to remind us that Chelsea is looming just over the horizon. The Clinton family, all three of them, will indeed be on the make, indefinitely.
24 posted on 06/05/2008 8:37:08 AM PDT by PerConPat (A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.-- Mencken)
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To: Allegra

News Flash to the MSM:75% of Americans don’t like the
Clintons.


25 posted on 06/05/2008 8:37:19 AM PDT by Dr. Ursus (( commander of the simian host))
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To: NewCenturions

And NOW the Bill Clinton we’re treated to is a white haired prematurely open-mouthed and doddering youngish old fool,who seems on the verge on losing his bodily functions, and whose only function left is to act on his wife’s behalf, and his own,just like one of his slavish spin doctors/hit men did 15 years ago. Interestingly, if it weren’t for what we already know about HER character, she has seemed to be getting younger, more congenial, more “viable”, than her tired and jaded husband. It may be too late for her, but I doubt it. I too, like Hitchens, think she’ll be back, and has never really left, and won’t.
I still think she will secure the nomination....somehow....


26 posted on 06/05/2008 8:38:24 AM PDT by supremedoctrine ("Time is the school in which we learn that time is the fire in which we burn" --Delmore Schwartz)
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To: Spunky; cardinal4

This brings to mind that old adage: “Be careful of what you wish for....” We all wanted very badly to see the end of the Clinton era and that appears - APPEARS - to be in sight. And look what we have in her place: the most inexperienced, ineffectual nobody that could conceivably be our next CinC. What Hath God Wrought?


27 posted on 06/05/2008 8:39:01 AM PDT by Ax (Obama: the Potawatomi Pantload)
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To: neverdem

bump


28 posted on 06/05/2008 8:40:07 AM PDT by Christian4Bush ("In Israel, the President hit the nail on the head. The nails are complaining loudly." - John Bolton)
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To: NewCenturions
"piggy-eyed bully"

THAT'S the Bill I remember!

Photobucket

29 posted on 06/05/2008 8:40:37 AM PDT by Cobra64 (www.BulletBras.net)
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To: StarFan; Dutchy; alisasny; BobFromNJ; BUNNY2003; Cacique; Clemenza; Coleus; cyborg; DKNY; ...

ping!


30 posted on 06/05/2008 8:40:48 AM PDT by nutmeg (Imagine Commander-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama)
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To: Spunky

That is a picture of a sociopath, if not a psychopath. I realized it the first time I laid eyes on Clinton in 1992, and have known so since. The so-called MSM that foisted the Clintons on America just did again with Obama.


31 posted on 06/05/2008 8:43:27 AM PDT by astounded (The Democrat Party is a Clear and Present Danger to the USA)
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To: supremedoctrine

think she’ll be back, and has never really left, and won’t.
I still think she will secure the nomination....somehow....

she didn’t concede..she suspended and is simply now waiting in the wings for something to happen which may or may not be planned..

IMHO, she ain’t out of it, and won’t be out until the convention..at the earliest..


32 posted on 06/05/2008 8:45:34 AM PDT by GeorgiaDawg32 (www.liberallunacy.bravehost.com..I'm a Patriot Guard Rider. www.patriotguard.org for info.)
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To: Dr. Ursus

“News Flash to the MSM:75% of Americans don’t like the
Clintons.”

I want to give credit to the MSM for inflicting the Clintons on us. Now they are trying to inflict Obama on us.


33 posted on 06/05/2008 8:46:26 AM PDT by popdonnelly (Does Obama know ANYONE who likes America, capitalism, or white people?)
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To: neverdem

34 posted on 06/05/2008 8:48:23 AM PDT by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: JZelle

“Wow! He seems to hate the Clintons as much as he hates Christians”

True. A guy who hates the Clintons and Mother Theresa does have range.


35 posted on 06/05/2008 8:48:43 AM PDT by y6162
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To: supremedoctrine

All those millions he made making speeches has come to an end. That’s one reason he is pissed.


36 posted on 06/05/2008 8:51:12 AM PDT by kempo (c)
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To: neverdem

He is spot on and I’ll never understand the overwhelming support she has received from conservatives with short memories. She and Bill are without a doubt the greater of the two evils. I don’t think Obama is the boogy man everyone would like to think he is. He’s got a lot of prominent backers putting it on the ilne for him and that makes him controllable. The Clintons would have absolute power and total free reign.


37 posted on 06/05/2008 8:53:40 AM PDT by jersey117
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To: iowamark

“SCARBOROUGH: Are you calling — are you calling Obama a shallow and flaky candidate? Do you —

HITCHENS: I’ve repeatedly called him a shallow and flaky candidate, and — though I thought he was an incredibly successful shallow and flaky candidate. I would add other things that are going to now get a second look that they’ve long deserved: this dumb, nasty, ethnic, rock ‘n’ roll, racist church that he goes to in Chicago, that’s going to — he won’t be able to walk away from that anymore. The crummy associates he’s got in Illinois, going on trial for corruption with their Iraqi friends. None of this is going to get the free ride from the press that it was getting until about this time yesterday morning.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.”

Chris had better watch his 6. He has put himself in danger by speaking the truth about two very dangerous families.


38 posted on 06/05/2008 8:54:36 AM PDT by Grampa Dave (Hussein ObamaMessiaHamas's Vanilla Ice Priest, Pfleger,“America is the greatest sin against God!")
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To: Ax
Don't blame God for this Obama-nation, man has a free will and we get what we ask for! The fact that this liberal twit, actually sees the light in regards to the Clintons is the real miracle.
39 posted on 06/05/2008 8:55:26 AM PDT by Dr. I. C. Spots
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To: neverdem

Oh darn, does this now mean that there will be books on ‘inside the crooked Clinton Presidency’ written by those in his cabinet. /sarc


40 posted on 06/05/2008 8:58:05 AM PDT by Dustbunny (Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. The Gipper)
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