Bill Clinton Savior or Saboteur?

ProfJohn

Lifer
Jul 28, 2006
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I think Maureen is pretty close with this one.

I hope we don't have to spend 4 more years with Clinton drama.
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Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it?s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let?s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we?re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We?ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ?92 and ?96. It didn?t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

?For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,? said a friend of the Clintons, ?Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.?

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today?s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?

Maybe the Boy Who Can?t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well.

?They?re not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had jealousy as the lifeblood of their marriage,? said one writer who has studied the pair. ?The lifeblood of their marriage is crisis, coming to each other?s rescue.?

Bill is staying up late strategizing and recasting her message and speeches. But he?s off his game on the trail, making clumsy mistakes like his remark ? bound to be shot down by Poppy Bush ? that Hillary would send 41 and 42 around the world to restore prestige lost by 43.

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife?s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C?est moi! ?The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...? he began.

He got so agitated with Charlie Rose ? ranting that reporters were ?stenographers? for Obama ? that his aides tried to stop the interview.

He also got in the way of her message with stretchers about opposing the Iraq war from the start, and ? in a slap at Obama ? deciding not to run in ?88 because he lacked experience. Truth is, he didn?t run for fear of bimbo eruptions.

While making a speech in Iowa, The Associated Press?s Ron Fournier reported, Bill used the word ?I? 94 times in 10 minutes, while mentioning ?Hillary? just seven times. At a London fund-raiser, one Hillaryite said, it took him nearly half an hour to mention her.

As the Arkansas journalist Max Brantley told the Billary biographer Sally Bedell Smith, ?He?s always evangelizing for the church of Bill.?

It?s hard to feel sorry for Hillary because the very logic of her campaign leads right to Bill. When she speaks of her ?experience,? she is referring not to the Senate but to the White House, thereby making her campaign a plebiscite on the ?90s.

Running this way, she is essentially asking people to like her if they liked him. Whether she knows it or not, this is a coattails strategy. It?s almost as if she?s offering herself to Clinton supporters as the solution to the problem of the 22nd Amendment.

Bill is a narcissist, but he?s also within his rights to think that she has invited him onstage. If she is his legacy, why should he muzzle himself? After all, you can?t ask Elvis to behave like Colonel Parker.

If voting for Obama is a roll of the dice, as Bill suggests, voting for Billary is a sure bet: an endless soap opera.
 

TheSlamma

Diamond Member
Sep 6, 2005
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I still don't understand why the people in this country want to allow 2 families to keep running this place. I think the Clintons are much less worse then the Bush's but either way this has to stop. IMO a democracy should NEVER have dynasties.
 

lupi

Lifer
Apr 8, 2001
32,539
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Originally posted by: TheSlamma
I still don't understand why the people in this country want to allow 2 families to keep running this place. I think the Clintons are much less worse then the Bush's but either way this has to stop. IMO a democracy should NEVER have dynasties.

Until the winner's name doesn't start with Rep or Dem we've been long past that point.
 

GenHoth

Platinum Member
Jul 5, 2007
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Originally posted by: TheSlamma
I still don't understand why the people in this country want to allow 2 families to keep running this place. I think the Clintons are much less worse then the Bush's but either way this has to stop. IMO a democracy should NEVER have dynasties.

QFT

BTW, This type of post should probably have some thoughts attached to it ProfJohn ;) Otherwise its just yesterdays news
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
72,400
6,077
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Originally posted by: TheSlamma
I still don't understand why the people in this country want to allow 2 families to keep running this place. I think the Clintons are much less worse then the Bush's but either way this has to stop. IMO a democracy should NEVER have dynasties.

Bill and Hillary aren't related.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,816
83
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Originally posted by: TheSlamma
I still don't understand why the people in this country want to allow 2 families to keep running this place. I think the Clintons are much less worse then the Bush's but either way this has to stop. IMO a democracy should NEVER have dynasties.

why not vote for the person whose policies you agree with the most and whom you think would do the best job, regardless of their last name?

voting against someone because of their name seems as bad as voting for it.
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
72,400
6,077
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Bill Clinton Savior or Saboteur?

I would say neither. It looks like a news person making up some news story filler to sell papers, a tricksy, verbal skills, tour de force signifying nothing but a cleverly sick imagination, the work of a vapid, intellectual, air-head.
 

Lemon law

Lifer
Nov 6, 2005
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Can any of remember the year 2000, when America was respected in the world for human rights. And we had an actual slight budget surplus.

Then we got a GWB who promised to be a uniter and is nothing more than a my way or the high way divider failure. Gee, Bill Clinton has something going for him that the GOP
can never match. If Hillary can bring back those better times, she has my vote.

As for the Republirats, their candidates have nothing to offer except more national suicide.

Tell me again non Prof John, why should we trust another GWB clone? Your thesis that Bill Clinton has nothing to offer to the national political debate is a total non starter given
the glaring failures of the GOP.
 

JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
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Originally posted by: Harvey
Y A W N !!!!!!!!! :roll:

TROLL! :cookie: :cookie: :cookie:

maybe...but he`s right on the money!!
Funny thing to call somebody who is telling the truth!!

:)
 

Lemon law

Lifer
Nov 6, 2005
20,984
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Since intelligence is not a criteria for voting, we can come to P&N and be inspired to find someone whose vote we can nullify by voting 100% the other way. My only regret is having but one vote when there are so many voters that need to be neutralized.
 

WHAMPOM

Diamond Member
Feb 28, 2006
7,628
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Bill Clinton the most successful Republican president in the last forty years. :thumbsup:And that's why they still hate so.:D
 

ProfJohn

Lifer
Jul 28, 2006
18,251
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Originally posted by: Harvey
Y A W N !!!!!!!!! :roll:

TROLL! :cookie: :cookie: :cookie:
How is an article by one of the best known writers in the country a troll??

You've turned into a sad parody it seems.