Maureen Dowd, I admit, can write as well as Peggy Noonan. It's just what she writes, most of the time, is born out of a narcissistic feminist liberal view that frankly, makes me want to puke.
But I guess it takes one narcissist to know another, because she has Bill Clinton pegged.
She asks:
Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?
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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.
Because you know, it's all about Bill.
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.
94 to 7. Good grief.
As the Arkansas journalist Max Brantley told the Billary biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “He’s always evangelizing for the church of Bill.”
Could that describe him any more perfectly?
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.
And that is the thing. Do we want a re-run of the politics of the 90's? Any of us? Left or right? Do we want whatever is hidden in the archives of Hillary's papers to become public after she is elected and start another cycle of the corruption, hatred, and sliminess that was the Clinton Presidency?
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