I won't link directly to Chris Hitchens' latest attack on those awful, awful Clintons. You'll have to find it by way of riverdaughter's brilliant riposte,
here. But I do want to repeat one of Hitchens' most obnoxious attacks:
In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers?
The Clinton Foundation is
here. Spend a few minutes there, then tell me how "self-interested" the Clintons are. When Ford left the presidency, he played golf.
By the way -- just what has Chris Hitchens ever done for humanity? It is true that, when young, he reported from many foreign climes, but his motives for doing so were hardly selfless. He was paid for his work and wanted to establish his journalistic credentials.
"Personal ambition"? Well,
anyone who runs for the highest office obviously has lots of the stuff. Obama's personal ambition was such that he ran for office without actually
doing much of anything first. That, my friends, crosses the line separating ambition from gall -- which explains, I think, why the man got only 52% in a year when any other Democrat would have received a landslide victory.
Impeached? Bill Clinton's popularity
increased when the Republicans brought nonsense charges against him.
"Discredited"? Let's talk about
discredited, Chissikins. Let's look at
your sorry-ass record.
In 1998, he befriended
Ahmed Chalabi.
In 2002, he praised George W. Bush's
"strong leadership."In 2003, he argued for the Iraq war tirelessly.
Here's some video to prove the point.
In 2004, he argued that
Plame and Wilson were wrong -- Saddam really did go shopping for plutonium in Niger.
Later, he argued in
The Nation that progressives should
vote for Bush. (Do you think that
The Nation would have allowed anyone to publish a pro-McCain piece in 2008? Nahhh...)
September, 2005:
"A War to Be Proud of":
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad"...
Well, enough. You know the man's history. I offer this brief refresher by way of asking one simple question:
What more does Chris Hitchens have to do to be considered discredited?In
Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen tells an obnoxious relative: "Actually, I think you're the
opposite of paranoid. You go around under the delusion that people
like you." He could have been talking about the war-loving Christopher Hitchens.
Riverdaughter's piece evinced a comment worthy of wider notice:
do you notice how everyone’s mum on W’s crimes against humanity but somehow still outraged by the pardon of Marc Rich? In the blissful harmony between W and Obama, only the Clintons remain the enemy.
Yeah. Why is that?