With a hat-tip to our e-pal Bill Keezer, here’s an old piece by the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he recounts his filing of an affidavit swearing that the Clintons had sought to smear and discredit Monica Lewinski.
It’s a fine example of Hitchens’ style — how I miss him! — and is well worth your time. It also contains this marvelous summary of Clintonism, as apt today as it was in 1999:
I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety””these were symptoms of a psychopath. And it kept on getting worse and worse””but not for Clinton himself, who could usually find a way of sacrificing a subordinate and then biting his lip in the only gesture of contrition he had learned to master. (After reading the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick, I’ll never be able to think of his lip biting in the same way again. But no doubt Arthur Schlesinger will be on hand to assure us that all men lie about rape.)
For more of Hitchens on the Clinton machine, read his book No One Left To Lie To. These people should never be allowed anywhere near the levers of power ever again.
3 Comments
And yet, to liberals, they are heroes for upholding the Ideology. This makes the long history of tyrannical Leftist leaders like Joe Stalin more plausible as a concept: when the audience cares nothing for integrity, and is only concerned with having its side of the football field of ideology win the game, that creates incentives for cynical manipulators like the Clintons.
Brett,
You are absolutely right. The next step would be to confiscate the public’s firearms. And then to begin random murders on a large scale, throughout the land (including the power hierarchy) to maintain a constant state of terror.
Nobody was safe, especially those close to the Generalissimo himself. That was how Stalin alone was able to rule absolutely the Soviet Union as the Red Czar until his death.
While I considered your block-quote as a quite good Hitchens summary of Clintonism I think this one is marvelouser