Bush's Magical Mystery Tour [Georgie Ann Geyer]
Really now, Georgie, wipe the drool off your chin!WASHINGTON -- This week, President Bush embarked upon a far-flung royal "victory" trip that had all the accoutrements of a conquering Roman Caesar and boasted of all the daring accomplishments of a modern-day Columbus or Alexander the Great.
The "Man Called W" rode away from our nation's capital in an elegant plane -- in place of the fancy-dress horses and gallant galleons of his predecessors -- while his bards and minstrels sang robust songs of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq to inspire the masses. En route, the president embraced small, relatively poor countries and drew them to his expansive bosom, even while he coolly pretended, with an apparently new form of Texan noblesse oblige, to make peace with the big countries he had never felt equal to.
Finally, even as we speak, the new American emperor has set up his court on the south of the Arabian peninsula in Sharm el-Sheikh and Aqaba to play (with many serious hopes) the grand role of "W of Arabia" in the sands of the ancient courts of Saladin, Harun al-Rashid and Ibn Saud.
The first reports from along the royal tour, which made their way back to this anxiously awaiting capital through the awed words of the poets and minnesingers of CNN, Fox and MSNBC, were not by any means all negative.
Living Hillary [American Spectator]
Washington -- Frankly, when I heard that Hillary Rodham Clinton had signed a deal to write a book for $8 million I doubted that she would write a word of it. For one thing, whenever Hillary testifies she lies. Any prosecutor who has ever pursued her knows that, and any publisher willing to fork out $8 million for a book wants it to be at least plausible. For another thing, when she published her last book, It Takes a Village, she did not write the book -- and, of course, lied about that. She claimed the mawkish little monograph was from her pen and her pen only, when actually it was written by Barbara Feinman. Everyone suspected Hillary had lied about writing the book. It was simply too free of lies for it to be her work. Angered by Hillary’s insistence that she alone had written the book, Miss Feinman leaked the news that Hillary held séances with Eleanor Roosevelt. Naturally, Hillary then lied about that too.
With this new book, Living History, an account of her life in the White House during the late scandals, again there is speculation that others did the writing. I have yet to read the book so I do not know if it contains a sufficient number of lies to sustain her claim of authorship. From what I have read I do believe that she wrote at least some of the book. Apparently in Living History she claims that from January 1998 to August 1998 she believed her husband’s claim that he had not had sex with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. That is a sufficiently implausible lie to conclude that it is a genuine effort by Hillary.
Lewinsky’s relationship was precisely the kind of relationship Bill Clinton had been having for years, right down to the trademark Clinton Biblical exegesis about oral sex not being adultery. Just four years before the revelations about Monica, the Arkansas state troopers in the pages of The American Spectator described assignations between Clinton and women, some of them being government employees, that involved precisely the same sex acts that Monica revealed. Moreover those of us familiar with the Clintons know that through all her years in Arkansas Mrs. Clinton had been engaged in propitiating the victims of her husband’s active libido. Surely when the story came out of the White House intern servicing her husband Hillary knew it was true.
Hillary probably also wrote the lines she claims to have uttered on August 15, 1998, after Bill told her in the White House that he had been lying about his blameless relationship with Lewinsky and that there had been intimacy. “I could hardly breath. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him….” That sounds like Hillary to me, particularly the yelling.
In fact the very nature of this lie is pure Hillary. Hillary and, for that matter, Bill, lie when there is no reason to lie. Who would blame her, if she were now to write that, yes, when the Lewinsky story broke she began to suspect it was true? Or for that matter why could she not now maintain a decorous silence about the whole embarrassing matter? No one would blame her for not bringing it up again. The country was supposed to move on, she told us. The country has, but here Hillary is again lying when she does not have to. And the lies keep coming.
According to the Associated Press’s report on the book, Hillary claims that during the six months when her husband was lying to her, to his staff, and to the nation about Monica, “For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents.” There were no “vicious scandals manufactured by political opponents.” Or at least there were very few.
Most of the scandals were acts Bill and Hillary actually committed. They did not need “political opponents” to “manufacture” them. All that was needed was a free press to report them and federal prosecutors to pursue them. In the end Clinton paid fines, gave up his license to practice law, and agreed to a huge financial settlement with Paula Corbin Jones. I have always thought that other women such as the abused Kathleen Willey and raped Juanita Broaddrick deserved settlements too.
As for Hillary, Independent counsel Robert W. Ray, in his last report on the Clintons, asserted that though there was not sufficient evidence to prosecute she had given factually inaccurate testimony and Whitewater involved criminal activity. Well, that is what we have come to expect from her, dishonesty. She is now the most popular Democrat in the country.