Posted on 05/25/2002 11:24:06 AM PDT by Roscoe Karns
Saturday May 25, 2002
The Guardian
A rambling and expensive speech by the former US president Bill Clinton in southern China has gone down spectacularly badly, according to the Chinese press.
Many in the audience in Shenzhen, which comprised various dignitaries, found it so hard to follow that they took off the headsets providing simultaneous translation.
Mr Clinton was supposed to speak on Thursday about the "World Trade Organisation and the Chinese real estate economy," because a local property company was paying him $250,000 (£170,000) for the speech.
Instead he uttered platitudes about the need for "personal understanding" between US and Chinese leaders and reminisced about his first visit to China in 1998, when he held a successful summit with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin.
Members of the audience, who had waited for hours because his plane was delayed, then asked him about international affairs and politics. "Although he had nothing worth saying, he kept going on," the Yangcheng Evening News commented yesterday.
Asked to predict the outcome of the Middle East crisis, Mr Clinton smiled ingenuously and confessed: "I don't know, I really don't know." The entire audience, which included the mayor of Guangzhou and 300 invited foreign and Chinese guests, burst out laughing.
Mr Clinton's chutzpah in collecting his fee without doing any homework has been widely noted. The Chinese Communist party's official People's Daily website reported it under the headline "Clinton reaps $250,000 in 30-minute speech in Shenzhen."
There was no apparent note of censure in the Chinese press comment yesterday; instead, the response seemed to be a hint of admiration that he could get away with. It was noted that Mr Clinton had earned only $100,000 for a speech to the Fortune Forum in Hong Kong last year.
He arrived in China from Japan, where he received an honorary doctorate at Nihon University and lectured on globalisation. Observers in Tokyo suggest that the Japanese press would have been far too polite to say that his speech there was less than riveting.
Kinda sums up 1992 - 2000 doesn't it?
Clinton finally acknowledges what we've known all along, he has no real idea what he's talking about.
Hardly! It's that vaccum cleaner schnozola and the nose candy he can buy with those tens of thousands of dollars.
I think its more then just beer!
Years of drug abuse, are finally beginning to take their toll on the old scumbag, der schlickmeister. He'll be totally braindead before too long. These are just the first signs.
Actually, they are both laughing at us. The joke is on America.
....looking at his red bulbulis nose, I'd say he's been snorting two or three little white lines.
Amazing from the Chinese press.
I'm concerned that he may continue to spew what he knows to folks who still wishes to harm America.
Just look at the creep Jimmy Carter and his fawning over Fidel Castro.
He'd better sock away some of his ill-gotten gains, because word gets around quickly in the speaking trade as to who is worth the money and who isn't, and those $250,000 gigs aren't going to last forever. Of course, I could be wrong, if it turns out nobody is really paying him to speak, they're just paying to meet him because they think he's a conduit to Democrats who can do them favors; in other words, if the speaking fee (like that $18 million worth of advances for books he and Hillary can't write and that nobody will buy) is really nothing more than a disguised bribe. But hey, what are the chances of THAT?!
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