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.
Clinton brought in with him a stream of cool, brisk air from outside. At six feet, two inches, with a jutting jaw, gray-green eyes, a ruddy complexion, and loose long limbs, Clinton was the most physically imposing person in the room, as he almost always was.
you could very well be right! Sidney must have gotten the very first pair of officially issued Clinton kneepads.
LOL, I think you and I may differ on the meaning of sanity in this case.
. . .while he may have been elsewhere on FNC; did sit through his almost too-painful-to-watch book/self-promo with Greta Van Susteren; who seemed totally oblivious to Sid's compromised reality.
. . . a bump for 'truth in labeling' and no one says it better than Hitchens.
You have to duck and weave sometimes through Hitch's politics in his writings but he's the best writer today in America.Actually he's a close second to fellow Atlantic Monthly columnist and sometimes drinking buddy P. J. O'Rourke. Still, this was the best Sinkmeister slam ever.
-Eric
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