CLINTON CONSIDERS DUBYA "EXTRAORDINARY" [John Podhoretz]
[ARTICLE AT END]
Some very interesting stuff in a very long New York magazine piece by the superbly talented Jennifer Senior about Bill Clinton and how he's living these days. Some highlights:
"As a rule, he refuses to bluntly criticize George W. Bush, whose political skills he considers 'extraordinary' and whose father he genuinely likes. When I ask whether he enjoys playing good cop around the world to George W.’s bad cop, he punts, saying, 'It’s not true that people dislike W. all over the world. In Russia, they probably like him more than they like me.' When I mention that both McCurry and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s former national-security adviser, told me that Clinton, too, would have gone to war with Iraq, he doesn’t deny the possibility, though he doesn’t confirm it either, saying, 'I’m still not exactly sure what the intelligence really said. But I can tell you this: I would have asked the Congress for authority to use force if Saddam did not allow the inspectors back in, or did not cooperate with them, or we found weapons of mass destruction. Because he never did anything he wasn’t forced to do, at least in my experience.'" (emphasis added)
But, astonishingly, he then tries to make the case that if only he'd had more time as president, he could have really hit Bin Laden and prevented 9/11" “I desperately wish, that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it.”
Oh, Bill, Bill, Bill. Everybody knew it was Bin Laden. You knew it was Bin Laden at the time. Richard Clarke in his book says you specifically ruled out military action after the Cole in October 2000 because you wanted to try once again to get an Israel-Palestinian peace deal. Get real. Oh, wait, I'm talking about Bill Clinton here.
Bill Clinton's Plan for World Domination
Clear your schedule for his third inauguration, here in New York in September.
New York Metro
By Jennifer Senior
There’s a tangible, almost merciful way that the postpresidency agrees with Bill Clinton. Here in Africa, where he’ll be spending the next seven days, he’s relaxed, smiling, pink. On the first night of our trip, in a faded old colonial hotel in Mozambique, he comes bounding to the dinner table in bright-white pants, a bright-white shirt, an almost-as-white sweater (knotted around his shoulders), and brand-new canary-yellow running sneakers, like some Queer Eye project gone cheerfully awry. I will soon discover that these running sneakers perfectly match one of his ties—he’s brought a whole array of pastel cravats for the Southern Hemisphere.
“You guys ordered already, right?” His appetite is back. He’ll shortly be plunging his fork into everything. “Hey, girl.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze.
And as soon as he’s seated, Clinton launches into stories. He’s a furious chatterer, talking in uninterrupted spurts; interjections are difficult, rejoinders impossible. His unscripted conversation is a combination of highbrow and bawdy, shrewd and reassuringly profane. It’s also Arkansan once again—over the course of this week, I will hear “It’s the darnedest thing,” “I wouldn’t take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon,” and (my favorite) “That guy’s lower than a snake’s belly,” among other regional aphorisms. During appetizers, he throws in an impersonation of Natan Sharansky’s reaction to a proposed withdrawal plan from Gaza:
I come from the biggest country in the world to one of the smallest countries in the world, and you vant me to cut it in half? I don’t sink so.
“Natan,” Clinton tries to plead. “You were not in the biggest country in the world. You were in a jail cell this big.” He extends his arms, approximating the dimensions.
I don’t sink so, Natan repeats.
Today, one could say the former president has the best of both worlds: He still visits with heads of state everywhere he goes, yet “there are no earthshaking adverse consequences,” as he puts it, if he declines to take up a cause. Though he no longer flies on Air Force One, private jets don’t seem to be in short supply. (For this particular trip, Issam M. Fares, the business magnate and deputy prime minister of Lebanon, lent us his private jet, a fabulous flying wonderland of retro suede recliners, wood paneling, and mirrors—one half expects Austin Powers to pop out of the loo.) He still stays in the finest hotels, yet he’s also regained some measure of privacy: In Zanzibar, two young women in bikinis, each roughly proportioned like Jessica Rabbit, spot him as he wanders by the pool and leap out of their chaise longues to chat. He loves it, lingers. Could he have done this before, without the tabloids wrenching some double-entendre headline out of the moment? One gets a perspective now that Ken Starr’s cloying legion of moralists could never fully appreciate: To Clinton, the world’s a seascape of temptations. And the hip-shaking sensuality of the pageantry here—so awkward for other world leaders they haven’t a clue where to put their eyes—seems perfectly of a piece with who he is.
“I loved being president,” Clinton tells me later that night. “I’d have done it again if there hadn’t been term limits, until the people threw me out. But now, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve woken up and said, ‘Gosh, I wish I were still president.’ I just don’t do it anymore.”
That may be so. But to come from nothing and become president of the United States, a person has to be metabolically preposterous, a freak cluster of aspirations and desires and appetites. To assume that this hunger would fade away after the presidency is naïve. In Kigali, Rwanda, I watch Clinton spend three minutes trying to coax a smile out of a long-faced child with AIDS; he simply will not leave until he’s managed to do so. In Lesotho, he jumps out of the car as we’re headed to the king’s palace and starts grabbing people’s hands. Why? For the simple joy of the contact? Because he’s still running for something?
Clinton is still a man of huge public-service aspirations. He’s still adored abroad. And he’s still considered president by the nation’s estranged, bluer half. Yet he’s also still deeply wounded, burdened by a sense of both underappreciation and unrealized promise. Much more than his successor, Clinton understood exactly which direction the world was headed when he twice took the oath of office, yet he didn’t, for reasons both circumstantial and of his own unlovely making, deliver some of the things he valued most: universal health care, a shored-up system of social security, energy independence, security at home and in the Middle East. He can’t rest on his laurels. So what does a man do with all this feral hunger—to do more, to set the record straight—and all this hurt, God, so much hurt, which steams off him with such intensity it practically blurs the air?
REST AT: newyorkmetro.com |
