Sunday, June 12, 2005

Bill Clinton's One and Only Love Affair. This man is really capable of love after all, but only for himself. I had a choice on my flight, between having dental work done on my teeth by somebody with Parkinson disease, and reading Bill Clinton's autobiography. To my great regret, I selected the latter. This is not an autobiography; it is an anthology of chronologies. And with all the interesting things that he dealt with, and the interesting people he met, there was nothing interesting in this book which clearly is reproduced from his daily White House schedule. He would not even provide interesting profiles of the world leaders that he met. Compare that to the highly interesting memoirs of Henry Kissinger for example. But he has no interest in anybody but himself. There is only ego-promotion here, and not a single interest in anybody else. And when he lists everybody as a "friend" it shows that he really has no friends, and is not capable of having friends. Nobody is an aquaintance; they all are "friends." His insincerity reeks from the pages, and the Babylonian Talmudic saying applies to him squarely: he can never be believed. It is his punishment. And the lies that he tells. And note that he never met a dictator that he did not like. And he retroactively wants us to think that he was working against Bin Laden every day. How convenient in retrospect for him. And his account of the Camp David summit between Arafat and Barak is now much closer to the account given by Bob Malley and Hussein Agha in NYR, which only proves that he had lied when he told the press at the time that the failure was due to the Palestinian side. He even acknowledges that he made those statements to bolster the political fortunes of Ehud Barak, whom he praises as a renaissance man. A renaissance man? Maybe I don't know what that means, but do renaissance men shoot poets in their sleep as Barak did in 1973 when he shot in cold blood the Palestinian poet Kamal Nasser in Beirut? Bill Clinton; I just wish that you never write another word.