But there is a common theme, which has to do with the quality that, in the end, made Clinton a most unusual president. It is not, Klein's valiant efforts notwithstanding, a positive quality. What comes across as the most important source of Clinton's uniqueness as president is the nearly unbelievable degree of his essential unfitness to be president -- his profound immaturity, his pathological selfishness, his cynicism, above all his relentless corruption.
In Klein's defense, Clinton emerges almost casually as "the apotheosis of his generation's alleged sins: the moral relativism, the tendency to pay more attention to marketing than to substance, the solipsistic callowness," possessed of an "angry, adolescent side," given to "almost hilarious self-involvement" and "childishness," "a man who would actually poll whether or not he should tell the truth" and who suffered from "moral turpitude," "a compendium of all that his accusers found most embarrassing, troubling and loathsome about themselves." Klein finds it plausible that Clinton ordered up lethal bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan "to turn the nation's attention away from the Lewinsky scandal." This, mind you, in defense.
These qualities don't make Clit'n unique, they make him a liberal. This board is crawlin with them.
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