Somber Notes From a Weary Bill Clinton

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times:
Somber Notes From a Weary Bill Clinton
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: June 4, 2005

....Mr. Clinton is on a midsize media tour these days, talking up his adventures as a United Nations envoy for tsunami relief; reminding audiences that his memoir, "My Life," will soon be available in paperback; and giving observers a chance to size up his health. His affecting appearance on "Talk of the Nation" was the sole radio component of the tour, as well as Mr. Clinton's first live turn on an hourlong NPR series. (The broadcast can be heard at www.npr.org.)...

***

Strained, hoarse and even doleful at times, Mr. Clinton's voice expressed a beaten-down, country-music melancholy, even as he reeled off facts and figures with his usual confidence. He laughed only once - at the playwright's reference to French arrogance - and he refrained from banter with the hosts, Neal Conan and Ira Flatow, who split a string of no-nonsense questions. Though Mr. Clinton insisted straightaway that tales of his fatigue on a recent trip to the Maldives had been exaggerated, he admitted that he had "not quite 100 percent" recovered from bypass surgery in September.

Certain statements also conveyed moral exhaustion as Mr. Clinton discussed issues from stem-cell research to torture: "It may be that I should have done more." "I think we did about all we could." "The country is growing a little weary of these cultural war elections." And finally, "if you beat people bad enough, they'll confess anything."...

***

Referring to one of his most recent initiatives to encourage service, a Davos-like conference to be held in New York City, Mr. Clinton said he planned to make participants promise to take action on one of four matters: poverty, AIDS and ignorance (that was one); climate change and global warming; religious reconciliation; or the quality of governing in fragile countries....

***

Strikingly, though Mr. Clinton deplored the influence of "cultural conservatives and religious fundamentalists" on American politics, he also expressed compassion for followers of those movements. "A lot of people feel that our culture is not only decadent but uncaring," he said, because they're "having to raise their children in a hostile world." Megachurches, he continued, offer an antidote to loneliness and fear....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/arts/04hrff.html

[livetohike]

1. Just finished reading My Life yesterday

He is a genius. I hope his health improves and he is around a long, long time. The world needs him.

[Trajan]

2. They keep referring to a 'Mister' Clinton ...

It is Mister PRESIDENT ....

President William Jefferson Clinton ....

SAY IT ...

PRESIDENT CLINTON!

He will ALWAYS be President Clinton ....

The bastards ....

[punpirate]

3. Clinton's a bright guy...

... but, he's still a fuck-up. That weighs as heavily on him as his health, these days.

He was far enough to the right to win, but too far right to be remembered as a great Democratic president, something I believe he wanted to be remembered as.

He's hurting because of his health, but he's hurting more because he couldn't figure out how to both win and be remembered as he wished. That's why he's in the shape he's in now.

He's now hamming it up with an effete, elite, lying, subterraneanly nasty snob like GHWB because he can't figure this class thing out. He never has been genuinely proud of coming up from the bottom--he's always tried to divorce himself from those roots, and that's why he is describing GHWB as a "wonderful" person, even though GHWB's reputation is nasty, GHWB's wife is nastily tempered, and his children are shits using their father's name to get ahead. GWB is proof enough of that.

Bill is still social climbing. He ought to stop it. He'd feel better about himself by doing so.

[amandabeech]

4. Excellent post. Clinton is also a pleaser. He seems to think that

he has to please everybody, so he can't really be true to anybody.

A former therapist said that Clinton is so ACOA (Adult Child of Alcoholics) that it hurts.

The guy needs help, and not just for his physical problems.

[applegrove]

5. Oh I think his appeal to the compassion of extremist religious types

goes right against the neocon agenda. Clinton it seems is trying to remind 'Christians' who they are. That they are human beings and that 'hostile world' is coming from somewhere not good. That would be the neocons. Who else is teaching hostility?

IMHO