Replies

1- New York politics is sui generis.
2- The wife had the entire corrupt presidential machine behind her.
3- 9/11 changes the whole dynamic. Personal posteriors will tend to trump political agendas and sloth.
4- It is clinton criminality which we mustn't underestimate.
The clintons' advancement beyond their level of incompetence is entirely a function of their criminality...

It's not easy to play fair against Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, who, in the words of the authors, "operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests." What's amazing, of course, is that's exactly what Clinton friends and aides have always done, from Susan McDougal to Webster Hubbell to flocks of nameless White House special assistants. Even Jim McDougal died just in time to deprive the independent counsel of a key witness against Mrs. Clinton, thus derailing what the authors report to have been her likely indictment for perjury and obstruction related to the Whitewater investigation.... Reading the tumultuous events of the Lewinsky probe in a comprehensive narrative is unlike attempting to make sense of it in daily doses. Something different comes through the heavy accumulation of detail of, for example, the duplicity of the Justice Department, or the sharklike behavior of the White House. One begins to get a choking sense of the atmosphere of corruption and ruthlessness the Clintons inhabit -- and, worse, have forced the rest of us to inhabit. Taken in one piece, the habitual, even casual abuse of power on display begins to resemble conditions one normally associates with a state of totalitarianism, where such concepts as truth and justice are only paid lip service. In the end, then, it makes you wonder when there will be fresh air again.

by Mia T, 12-17-01

"I have no infrastructure to deal with this."

bill clinton

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

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 when she wrote, "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
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.

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.] ...

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters."

- Frank Lloyd Wright

Someone recently tested the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of Will Shakespeare, but all they got were the plays of bill clinton.
Rumor has it William Jefferson Clinton himself is to recite Honest Abe's lines in this New Year's Eve pageant. Whoever writes these scripts has a natural talent for irony. For some irrepressible reason, one cannot help but think of that costume party in "The Manchurian Candidate,'' complete with Red Queen and Abe Lincoln in stovepipe hat and fake beard.
Hillary Clinton says it's a great opportunity to unite the nation. (The way she's united New York?) But the Clintons are never so polarizing as when they are intent on uniting us. How can that be? Maybe it's their perfectly fabricated authenticity. The Nineties have had much the same effect, stirring the same vague dissatisfactions -- and sparking sudden outbursts of temper. What was it that poor, embarrassed David Brinkley, thinking his mike was off, said after the president's victory speech in '96: "We all look forward with great pleasure to four years of wonderful, inspiring speeches, full of wit, poetry, music, love and affection, plus more goddam nonsense.''

Still not finished, Mr. Brinkley added that this president "has not a creative bone in his body. Therefore, he's a bore, and will always be a bore.'' Oh, dear. The commentator's unintentionally public thoughts were all the more embarrassing for being so widely shared by any Americans still sentient four years into the Age of Clinton. But it's one thing to notice such things, quite another to say them out loud. Why belabor the obvious?

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

Mindless rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy

by Mia T
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 pols understand their anatomical limitations well; they attempt to mitigate them with veneer. And so we suffer mindless alpha-beta-beelzebubba grotesquerie. . .

and rhinestone-studded-and-tented kleptocracy.
With all the media genuflecting before the press-conference podium of bill clinton, it bears remarking yet again that the clinton intellect (an oxymoron even more jarring than AlGoreRhythm and meant to encompass the cognitive ability of both clintons) is remarkable only for its utter ordinariness, its lack of creative spark, its lack of analytic precision, its lack of depth.
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.
Jimmy Breslin agrees. In Hillary Is the 'Me-First' Lady, Breslin laments:
"At the end of all these years and years that are being celebrated this week, the national press of America consists of people with dried minds and weak backbones and the pack of them can't utter a new phrase for the language or show the least bit of anger at a business or profession or trade or whatever this business is that is dying of mediocrity."

Listen carefully to the clintons. You will hear a shallow parody of the class president. Not only do they say nothing; they say nothing with superfluous ineloquence. Their speeches are sophomoric, shopworn, shallow, specious. Platitudinous pandering piled atop p.c. cliché
In seven years, they have, collectively, uttered not one memorable word save, "It was a vast right-wing conspiracy," "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,"and, "It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Even the clintons' attempts at alliteration fall flat. Compare Agnew's (Safire's) "nattering nabobs of negativism" with clinton's "preachers of pessimism," an impotent, one-dimensional, plagiaristic echo (its apt self-descriptiveness notwithstanding).
Before they destroy their backs along with their reputations, media gentry genuflecting at the altar of the clinton brain should consider Edith Efron's, Can the President Think?
A wasted brain is a terrible thing.
See also:
Can the President Think?
THE MYTH OF HILLARY'S BRILLIANCE
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
Annotated by Mia T