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.
No,what's amazing is we hear the truth from the controlled Chinese press that our own "free press" won't even whisper.
Bear in mind that the Guardian is to the left of the Chinese press.
Kinda sums up 1992 - 2000 doesn't it?
You took the words off of my keyboard!
And as the saying goes: I wouldn't listen to him if you payed me!
I'll fall asleep smiling tonight.
LOL. Me too.
Then again,even Bubba-1 didn't give China PERMANENT "Most Favored Nation" trade status,like Bubba-2 did. I guess the fact that Bubba-1 didn't have family members as business partners with the Chinese elites like Bubba-2 does might have something to do with that.
Most certainly is. His "nose" has always shown all. Remember his appearance at the WTC Memorial gathering? He had this huge boil. It looked so awful! Personally, I wouldn't have gone out in public anywhere looking like that.
How many times during his speeches did we see his nose dripping, red, swollen? But the press called it, "Allergies." Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I know a lot of people with allergies (of all kinds) and not one of them have the same nose symptoms xclinton has.
I'm with you. I always cringed whenever I heard him speak. In addition to your comments, the constant sickening self-congratulation plus the cheap lie-in-every-sentence content always managed to drive me away from the t.v. set. After awhile, of course, I just got so I turned him off or changed channels whenever he came on.
It's sort of like the media trying to make algore out to be hypermasculine when he's so obviously just the reverse. Mainstream media people really do lie when they characterize people in their coverage; they don't merely shade the truth (well, okay, they do that, too).
"Great challenge of the first decade of the 21st century, therefore, is to move from interdependence to integration with a real global consciousness."
(Insert here the Esquire photo as a reminder of what he really thinks).
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