To me, that means he's a pip-squeak. One of my sneezes would blow him away.
(6' 6" 255lbs.)
The bombing starts in five minutes.
Posted on 06/02/2003 11:55:49 AM PDT by MHGinTN
In his new book Sidney Blumenthal presents a disconcertingly cynical yet naive account of the Clinton years
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
.....
The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal Farrar, Straus & Giroux ow is it that domestic politics in this country is at once so rancid and so banal, so embittered and yet so uninspiring? Why should it be that two parties with few if any essential differences are ready to speak of each other as if a cultural or even a civil war were only a few speeches away? Obviously, much of this fatuous rhetoric arises from the need to disagree more and more about less and less, to maintain the mills of fundraising in a churning condition, and to keep the dwindling groups of genuine loyalists and activists in a state of excited pseudo-commitment. But much of the dankness and dinginess is owed to the influence exerted by professional political operators, those who have a careerist interest in "the process" as it is—which is to say partisan in theory and bipartisan in practice.
Those in the unelected election business who become celebrities are sometimes quite willing to work for either party. Dick Morris, to take a notorious example, toiled energetically for Jesse Helms before being hired by the Clintons. David Gergen's mysterious usefulness to a succession of Republican and Democratic Presidents will almost stand comparison with the mystical utility of the Reverend Billy Graham to Eisenhower and Nixon, Carter and Clinton. The self-satirizing summa of all this is the bizarre marriage of Mary Matalin and James Carville, who actually contrived to run opposing presidential campaigns in 1992 while still, at the end of the day, proving that the two parties were essentially in bed together.
To me, that means he's a pip-squeak. One of my sneezes would blow him away.
(6' 6" 255lbs.)
The bombing starts in five minutes.
This makes it all the more peculiar that Blumenthal should close with a lengthy citation from someone he describes as a "great admirer" of history's greatest Republican.
Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you? ...
He continues:
You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it, You may read the President's message and read nothing about it there ...
And he concludes:
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are,
The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of  commerce and mails, are all for you.
No reference is given, but this is taken from Walt Whitman's A Song for Occupations, which is not in praise of Lincoln but is instead a hymn to honest toil and the uplifting of the land. Very many stanzas separate the three that Blumenthal has chosen to run together, and the poem as a whole does not aim to make us excessively respectful of those who are kind enough to rule over us. It might have been more apt to pick something from, say, By Blue Ontario's Shore.
Have you possess'd yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea,
the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the whole People?
But then, if one sought any further illustration of the ways in which partisanship dulls the mind and the soul, it might be found in Sidney Blumenthal's highly incautious decision to try and make any peroration out of Leaves of Grass, briefly pressed onto Monica Lewinsky as a courtship accessory by the Nixon of the liberals.
Clinton isn't the first male to to lie and defame women. But has there been another who so cynically manipulated voters with his supposed pro-women agenda? Would women really need the laws he advocated, particularly in the workplace, if there were not men like him?
In the video presentation that the government shows to its new employees regarding sexual harassment during the Clinton administration, guess who makes the opening statement?
I have no idea if they've changed it or not.
I wonder how he knows that? :-)
And is "that" the ultimate "goal" of that act, for the woman to derive pleasure or excitement from it?
Dereliction of Duty will undoubtedly ousell Blumenthal's book, because conservatives READ books!
"In March of 1998, having not seen much of Blumenthal since he had joined the Clinton team (I had been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley), I was eager to catch up with him. With my wife, Carol, I took him for a reunion snack. I don't think I will or could ever forget the transformation. Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clever if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place seemed to be someone who had gone to work for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly engulfing the capital."
Sidney went over to the dark side.
I'm amazed at the effect the Clintons have on people.
It's downright cultish...
We are a nation now about to embrace cannibalism without meaningful deabte, mainly because PC has erased the right to apply conscience. And ultimately, that is the thing to which the clinton criminal enterprise appealed (yes, his behavior and his underlings defense of same IS a litany of criminal acts that will likely go unpunished), political correctness. Such appeal allows all manner of specious reasoning to rule the debate, since the liberalized media resists giving up any bit of their achieved 'freedom to fashion the visual field' of America and America's youth. With the last, Hitch would disagree, more because he has a blindspot where morality is at issue than because the notion might be false.
Figures. I have had to sit through countless sexual harassment workshops and training sessions. In every company I have worked for Clinton would have been fired. On top of that, once it was perceived that Lewinsky was getting preferential treatment, he would have been sued by the other employees. And corporate America could not have defended it as a private matter.
LOL!! Blumenthal isn't capable of perceiving reality, but there is no question that he reveals a fertile imagination.
Thanks for the ping Howlin
Blumenthal was on FNC last week and I just sat there shaking my head ..
Justshe ... Delusional is to kind of a description ... this man is completely off his rocker
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