- by Mia T
EW YORK, Sunday, Feb. 3 -- Rather than courageously confronting major league media, hillary clinton continues to subsist on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind. Again today, clinton chose to be interviewed not by George Will et al. on the network ABC show, Sunday Morning with Sam and Cokie, but by second-string clinton lackeys on third-rate local fare that followed Sunday Morning in the New York market. Clinton failed to exceed local performance parameters with ease, clogging the airwaves with standard-issue clinton claptrap.
By continuing to eschew the politically obligatory Sunday morning circuit and formidable inquisitors like George Will, clinton only encourages the incipient whispers of ineptitude, depravity and failure that are filling the Senate cloakroom.
In addition to this display of cowardice, ineptitude, depravity and failure, one of the more significant continuous predictors of clinton's political moribundity is clinton's tic-like insertion of "you know."
A marker for ineloquence, vulgarity, ignorance, rube-meets-valley-girl demographics, low self-esteem, anxiety and insincerity, clinton "you knows" were less frequent during this interview than during the one conducted on January 17th by Jeff Greenfield. This result is consistent with the previous finding, that the frequency of clinton "you knows" varies directly with the intensity of interviewer contempt for the clintons and inversely with the magnitude of interviewer softballs.
If hillary clinton continues to secure her politically moribund position via second-string clinton lackeys on third-rate local fare, Mort Sahl put the intellectual--if not the final--nail in the clinton legacy coffin on CNN's first-waterloo last month.
Sahl, the 60s satirist and self-professed "radical independent," who cut his political-eyeteeth at the Hungry i, announced, "I have no desire to meet clinton; with no morality, there's nothing there." That the eponymous Clinton News Network televised the demise only adds to the irony.
By way of contrast, the intrepid iconoclast, who never knew a president he didn't skewer, went on to express pride in knowing "the two Bushes," the Kennedys and Nixon.
So much for the clinton legacy.
The CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme, counterproductive on its face, is now officially dead. If the clintons had any concern for the American aesthetic, they would bury it...and themselves, while they're at it.
by Mia T The smartest woman in the world would relish "the raucous give and take of American democracy, " as Charles Kuralt once put it.
hillary clinton, by contrast, subsists on cozy clintonoid interviews of the Colmes kind...
In her new book, Political Fictions, Joan Didion indicts the fakery of access journalism practiced by vacant politicos like the clintons, whom she sees as "purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news."
(More Didion: "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.")
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THE HILLARY, YOU KNOW, CLINTON TRANSCRIPT:
- Analyzed and Annotated
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by Mia T
- January 22, 2002
- Analyzed and Annotated
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE [YOU KNOW] 'UPDATED'
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Background: Using internal polling, the clinton 'infrastructure' determined that its cozy-clintonoid-interviews-of-the-Colmes/King-kind-scheme is no longer working. The scheme, which successfully shepherded and shielded the vacuous, inept, corrupt clintons for nine years, is now, post-9/11, yielding diminishing returns--and worse--increasing ridicule. Hence, we had the clinton 'infrastructure' interviewer recalculation last week that specified more interviewer gravitas...and less lapdog...but not more doggedness...that is to say...that specified Jeff Greenfield. A miscalculation, as it turned out. Greenfield made up in contempt what he lacked in inexorability. (Although he conducted the entire interview circumambulating on eggshells, Greenfield did eventually ask the ugly questions.) Analysis: Greenfield's circuitous path to clinton depravity and failure necessitates a nonlinear analysis of the data; we will use a nonlinear least squares curve fitter. Proportional hazards political survival regression analysis will generate a political survival curve for hillary clinton, which will show her viability (so to speak) over time. Political survival time is defined as the length of the interval between the initial political trial balloon and political moribundity. Political moribundity is defined as two consecutive political failures--(one in the case of 9/11), or three not-necessarily-consecutive boo-filled public appearances, or one instance of a serious proposal generating laughter. ASIDE: Since by any of these standards, hillary clinton is already flatlined, the more interesting question for this analysis would be: "What the hell is this moribund loser doing in the political arena, anyway?" Survival is influenced by one or more factors, called "predictors" or "covariates", which may be categorical (such as the quality of 'infrastructure') or continuous (such as intellect or eloquence or character). Results:
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GREENFIELD: Tonight, a conversation with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on the nation and the world after September 11, on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.
THE COMPLETE ANNOTATED INTERVIEW (NB: a very long, you know, download because of the, you know, clinton criminal, you know, redundancy.)