Replies

by Mia T

One of the unintended consequences of America's rejection of mandated political correctness is that legends crumble.

The classic case is that of Bill Clinton. The conventional wisdom has been (even from his critics) that notwithstanding policy and philosophy disagreements Bill Clinton was/is a smart, charming, even brilliant man.

The reality that is becoming increasingly clear to those willing to see is that "The President Clinton Package" and his team of advisers, managers, and spin doctors, were smart, charming and at times brilliant. However, left to his own devices and without the support, advice, counsel and coercive powers of office, Bill is (for the second time in two months) emphatically demonstrating he ain't all that smart.

Bill's big yap:

Geoff Metcalf slams Clinton's foot-in-mouth sophistry

"I have no infrastructure to deal with this."

bill clinton

THE PETER PRINCIPLE/clinton corollary
(no pun intended)

Any cognitive measure of the clintons must necessarily come up short. Indeed, the clintons, themselves, confirmed their own vacuity several decades and many elections ago. (The Peter Principle / clinton corollary: The clintons' advancement beyond their level of incompetence is entirely a function of their criminality.)

Edith Efron (Can the President Think?) had it almost right. "This profoundly dysfunctional, grotesque aberration can function only with the assistance of prosthesis -- in the form of his wife, Hillary, or, to a lesser extent hired guns from outside his circle of sycophants." [Efron confuses psychometrics with dominatrix; the "hired guns from outside his circle of sycophants" provided the bulk of the brains for both of them.]

Mia T 3/12/99

Note the highlighted section in particular with regard to the following recent statement by clinton concerning his inability to deal with Pardongate:
"I have no infrastructure to deal with this."

Having bought lock, stock and barrel the clinton PR about clinton IQ, the pundit class routinely experiences massive cognitive dissonance whenever a clinton does something really dumb (which is quite often). To resolve the dissonance, the punditry either ascribes to a clinton's act of stupidity a complexity that would confound Machiavelli, or, alternatively, shakes its collective head in disbelief, wondering how someone so smart could do something so stupid. And so it was last Sunday with The New York Times clinton pardongate apologia.

On its face, the piece read like it was written by a developmentally arrested crook. While most called it thus, others, notably William Safire, tongue erratically in cheek, marveled at clinton's cleverness, not understanding, so it seems, that we are never in imminent danger of clinton cleverness.

Sometimes a cigar is...just a cigar...

Ockham's razor applies. The clintons consistently behave stupidly simply because they are stupid. Strip away the clinton "infrastructure" and what remains are two rather shallow, shopworn, supercilious rubes.

The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.

See also:

Can the President Think?

THE MYTH OF HILLARY'S BRILLIANCE

Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy

OFF THE RECORD: AN OLD DOG NEEDS NEW TRICKS

The man is an artist: He's not just 'Slick Willie' anymore

Hey, what a party!
New Year's at the White House

hillary's head revisited:
hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) II

Senator Dim Bulb by Gary Aldrich © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Annotated by Mia T
hillary's head revisited:
hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) II
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.")

Miss Hillary. . . strikes me as one of those innumerable people whose prose is so dull that they are reduced to using equally prosaic cusswords.

Paul Greenberg, The man is an artist: He's not just 'Slick Willie' anymore

John Podhoretz recently asked, "Whence comes hillary clinton's reputation for brilliance?" For the answer, he intuitively, rather brilliantly in fact, looked to her anatomy and noted,"This isn't the first time she's shot herself in the foot."

...The above anatomical analysis supports the Podhoretz thesis. Notwithstanding The Pod's erroneous conclusions concerning ~~HILLARY!~~ clinton's heart and nerve, he basically has it right. Anatomy is destiny.

Ian Hunter recently observed that our leaders are shrinking. "From a Churchill (or, for that matter, a Margaret Thatcher) to a Tony Blair; from Eisenhower to Clinton; from Diefenbaker to Joe Clark; from Trudeau to Chretien -- we seem destined to be governed by pygmies."

...The clintons' fundamental error: They are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.

Politicos and reporters are not rocket scientists . . .
Professions tend to be self-selected, intellectually homogeneous subgroups of Homo sapiens. Great intellects (especially these days) do not generally gravitate towards careers in the media or politics. Mediocre, power-obsessed types with poor self-images do.

Thus, clinton mediocrity goes undetected primarily because of media mediocrity. ("Mediocrity" and "media" don't come from the same Latin root (medius) for no reason.) Insofar as the clintons are concerned, the media confuse form with substance, smoothness with coherence, data-spewing with ratiocination, pre-programmed recitation with real-time analysis, an idiosyncratic degeneracy with creativity.

Mia T

Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy

"Hillary's people are very bright," said a well-connected Democrat yesterday. "But they think everybody else is stupid."
Stupid is as stupid does, says Off the Record. . .

OFF THE RECORD: AN OLD DOG NEEDS NEW TRICKS

Q ERTY4

"Hillary thinks that Tipper is an unintellectual nice lady who doesn't have a brain in her head"...

DEBORAH ORIN

BIG CHILL FOR TIPPER & HILL

Talk about the pot calling the kettle empty...

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln: She can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any person I know. [NOTE: Lincoln didn't know HIM.] ...

Q ERTY6

"Has that clinton "legacy" made you feel safer yet?"

Lest Americans ever forget why the clintons, and all their enablers need to be hectored, hounded, and harried into silence, until "clintonese is only spoken in Hell," look here:

The Holiday *Best* of Bill Clinton & his Friends!

-clintonism in one easy lesson--

-"until clintonese is spoken only in Hell!"--