WRITTEN IN STONE: AN ARCHITECT DEFINES THE CLINTONS
virtualclintonlibrary.blogspot.com
 

 

by Mia T, 12-30-02

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
f mutability of meaning was necessary for the survival of the clintons--their survival hinged ultimately on the deconstruction of words and laws--it is more than a little ironic, and a manifestation of the special sway and shortsightedness of the pathologic ego, that clinton's monument to himself will necessarily define the clintons with the permanence of great inviolate places of iconic architecture.

Whereas a huckster removes meaning from institutions--the wife picked up where the husband left off--an architect encodes meaning in buildings. James S. Polshek, the architect with the dubious distinction of having been commissioned to build the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, believes that a successful architectural solution must necessarily be rooted in relevance.

Just as Polshek's buildings have physical layers, so too do they have layers of meaning. His Rose Center for Earth and Space, for example, is informed formally and programmatically by the historic architecture of a designated landmark even as it redefines itself, (often too self-consciously, in my view), in Star-Trekian terms. Reduced to its essence, the building is the nascent universe before the Big Bang, the promise of the undifferentiated cell in its mother's womb.

The "bridge to the 21st century" was, perhaps, clinton's most delusional conceit, so it is not surprising that it would become clinton's self-referential metaphor of choice. His library was to be that bridge, if he had anything to say about it...

 

The architect is often the master of the inside joke, witness Robert Venturi's postmodern chairs. Venturi exploited--unabashedly and with abandon--the vocabulary of Las Vegas, its stage-set-as-reality and its roadside culture--bright, clashing, ugly and fake. The architect's inside joke is his hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage.

The flip side of the encoded meaning of the architect is the terrorist's decoding of it. To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was Jewish capitalism encoded in urban space. If Polshek's vision of clinton's library is a bridge, the inside joke is that, at best, it is a bridge to nowhere.

More likely, it is a bridge to the 7th century...or a doublewide to house clinton double-speak. Take your choice.

copyright Mia T 2002, 2006

 

The court painter, like the commissioned architect, is the master of the inside joke. It is his only realistic hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage.

The artist-for-hire encodes the joke in his work. The joke's efficacy is directly related to its decodability. If it is too obvious, or if it is too obscure, it doesn't work.

Whereas the latter error is often harmless, the former is almost always fatal: If the joke is too obvious, the work of art, itself, becomes the punch line. The clinton library, which shimmies in the hot Arkansas sun like a trailer park or a bridge to nowhere depending on where you stand, suffers from this kind of failure.1

Nelson Shanks' portrait of bill clinton, which was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery on Monday, is similarly flawed. Its jokes are so obvious, in fact, that when clinton ceremoniously pulled off its cover at the unveiling, what was exposed was not a portrait at all but a full-blown punch line.

What we saw....

HEY CLINTON! SIZE DOESN'T MATTER.
by Mia T, 4.27.06

READ MORE



 

Alien Abductions, Flying Saucers + Other Weird Phenomena, c.1992-2000

by Mia T, January 3, 2006



 

THE ALIENS

Mia T, June 9, 1999


The only way they can win is to convince people that we're space aliens.

bill clinton


With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie.

Antony and Cleopatra V, ii, 304-05

 










eggy Noonan's excellent piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is really the story of the death of democracy. At its core it is the description of the human double helix gone terribly awry, of a denatured protein grotesquely twisted, of two mutant, tangled strands of DNA, the basest imaginable of base pairs linked permanently, as firmly as guanine to cytosine, bill inexorably to hillary and conversely, doing what they do best, and doing it relentlessly.

Killing.
Killing insidiously.
Killing as they pose and pander and feel our pain.

My only complaint is with Peggy Noonan's title.
The Mad Boomer, doesn't begin to capture candidate clinton considered separately or even taken as the self-anointed "twofer," permanently conjoined at that cavity conspicuously empty except for ego, that place where brain and soul and guts and heart normally reside.

This is not to say that she -- that they -- are not both quite mad and of that self-indulgent, arrogantly, ignorantly solipsistic age sandwiched flatly between yesterday's innocence and tomorrow's insouciance. Rather, it is that their madness and their boomerism don't even begin to explain their noxious influence: The cloying, internally inconsistent clinton calculus. The unspoken clinton threats. They permeate the atmosphere like a coiling miasma, choking off all freedom.

Even in New York.
Especially in New York.

When she wrote "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus hardly had in mind this pair of mutant, deadly, twisted aliens.

So forget Arkansas-Illinois carpetbaggery and standard issue muckraking. The clintons are aliens of quite another sort. They are extrinsic, not of this world. They are inhuman. They are dehumanizing.

You may recall that the first act of this story of two degenerates maintained by iterating idiots, farce of farce ad infinitum, was generated quite by accident by iterated AlGoreRhythm, who, it should be noted, is now himself the object of iterated calculation by said degenerates who want iteration 2004 all for themselves.

And thus the odd bit of bloody Gore in Act II: The ugly sight of a corrupt, bottom-heavy hillary self-impaled on the horns of a Treason-Dilemma- masquerading-as-a-Third-Term-Dilemma-masquerading-as-a-Senate-stampede, for example, or bill's recent unsolicited, underwhelming Times interview on the Gore candidacy.

Act I was called "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Ostensibly the tale of the wife of a bloodthirsty crime boss who finds romance with a bland bookseller between courses at her husband's restaurant, it was in fact the Thyestean and moveable -- yet unmoving -- feast of hillary clinton at her husband's sham restitution. (Note the reciprocity. The sham restitution in Act II is all hillary's.)

Food, color coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism were the exotic (if mostly horizontal) fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern memoir which passed as ancient fable about nouveau riche rapacity.

Not for the faint at heart, Purple Hearts or queazy stomachs, this depiction of the gross debasement of America was heavily peppered with irony and dark humor throughout.

Although she baked no cookies, didn't do illicit land or cattle deals and stood by no man, hillary clinton starred in the triple role of the Cook, the Thief and his Wife. Her lover was played at once vaporously and in workmanlike fashion by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, with Janet Reno, between her stints rendering intermittent injustice for the Husband, as the reliable stand-in. Sidney Blumenthal was the stand-in for the Cook and Craig Livingstone the stand-in for the Thief. The last-minute addition of Christopher Hitchens as the snitch was a stroke of absolute genius notwithstanding its cerebral accident, its predictable-if-perfect pitch (or its facile alliteration).

Although Act I had no rating, the new clinton soccer-mom directive will require a photo ID for any viewer without independent proof of illegal alien DNC <-> DNA sequencing.

 

In Act II, rabid anti-clinton voters, roughly 33% of the U.S. populace according to as-yet-unpodded pollsters, become increasingly aware that they are disappearing in droves and being replaced by alien pod replicas that have their physical attributes but lack all anti-clinton affect.

If Act I was a thinly veiled allegory about naked clintonism, then Act II is a parable about the plan for world domination by the Establishment, aged hippies in pinstripes all, with their infantile, solipsistic world view amazingly untouched by time.

 

 

COPYRIGHT Mia T 1999, 2006

Well, with the help of the 100 corrupt and cowardly cullions, clinton walked. The senators' justification for their acquittal votes requires the suspension of rational thought (and, in the curious case of Arlen Specter, national jurisdiction).

Mia T, Musings: Senatorial Courtesy Perverted







"Impeachment did not have to be for criminal offenses -- but only for a 'course of conduct' that suggested an abuse of power or a disregard for the office of the President of the United States ... A person's 'course of conduct' while not particularly criminal could be of such a nature that it destroys trust, discourages allegiance, and demands action by the Congress...The office of the President is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."


Hillary Clinton
Democrat assistant, 1974
effort to impeach president Nixon



THE OTHER NIXON

 
by Mia T, 01.11.99



ypocrisy abounds in this Age of clinton, a Postmodern Oz rife with constitutional deconstruction and semantic subversion, a virtual surreality polymarked by presidential alleles peccantly misplaced or, in the case of Jefferson, posthumously misappropriated.

Shameless pharisees in stark relief crowd the Capitol frieze:

Baucus, Biden, Bingaman, Breaux, Bryan, Byrd, Cohen, Conrad, Daschle, Dodd, Gore, Graham, Harkin, Hollings, Inouye, Kennedy, Kerrey, Kerry, Kohl, Lautenberg, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Mikulski, Moynihan, Reid, Robb, Rockefeller, Sarbanes, Schumer.

These are the 28 sitting Democratic senators, the current Vice President and Secretary of Defense -- clinton defenders all -- who, in 1989, voted to oust U.S. District Judge Walter Nixon for making "false or misleading statements to a grand jury."

In 1989 each and every one of these men insisted that perjury was an impeachable offense. (What a difference a decade and a decadent Democrat make.)

Senator Herb Kohl (November 7, 1989):

"But Judge Nixon took an oath to tell the truth and the whole truth. As a grand jury witness, it was not for him to decide what would be material. That was for the grand jury to decide. Of all people, Federal Judge Walter Nixon certainly knew this.

"So I am going to vote 'guilty' on articles one and two. Judge Nixon lied to the grand jury. He misled the grand jury. These acts are indisputably criminal and warrant impeachment."

 

Senator Tom Daschle (November 3, 1989):

"This morning we impeached a judge from Mississippi for failing to tell the truth. Those decisions are always very difficult and certainly, in this case, it came after a great deal of concern and thoughtful analysis of the facts."  

 

Congressman Charles Schumer (May 10, 1989):  

"Perjury, of course, is a very difficult, difficult thing to decide; but as we looked and examined all of the records and in fact found many things that were not in the record it became very clear to us that this impeachment was meritorious."

 

Senator Carl Levin (November 3, 1989):

"The record amply supports the finding in the criminal trial that Judge Nixon's statements to the grand jury were false and misleading and constituted perjury. Those are the statements cited in articles I and II, and it is on those articles that I vote to convict Judge Nixon and remove him from office."

 

* * * * *

"The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself," observed the philosopher Hannah Arendt. "What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."

If hypocrisy is the vice of vices, then perjury is the crime of crimes, for perjury provides the necessary cover for all other crimes.

David Lowenthal, professor emeritus of political science at Boston College makes the novel and compelling argument that perjury is "bribery consummate, using false words instead of money or other things of value to pervert the course of justice" and, thus, perjury is a constitutionally enumerated high crime.

The Democrats' defense of clinton's perjury -- and their own hypocrisy -- is three-pronged. 

ONE:

clinton's perjuries were "just about sex" and therefore "do not rise to the level of an impeachable offense."

This argument is spurious. The courts make no distinction between perjuries. Perjury is perjury. Perjury attacks the very essence of democracy. Perjury is bribery consummate.

Moreover, (the clinton spinners notwithstanding), clinton's perjury was not "just about sex." clinton's perjury was about clinton denying a citizen justice by lying in a civil rights-sexual harassment case about his sexual history with subordinates.

TWO:

Presidents and judges are held to different standards under the Constitution.

Because the Constitution stipulates that federal judges, who are appointed for life, "shall hold their offices during good behavior,'' and because there is no similar language concerning the popularly elected, term-limited president, it must have been perfectly agreeable to the Framers, so the (implicit) argument goes, to have a perjurious, justice-obstructing reprobate as president.

clinton's defenders ignore Federalist No. 57, and Hillary Rodham's constitutional treatise on impeachable acts -- written in 1974 when she wanted to impeach a president; both mention "bad conduct" as grounds for impeachment.

"Impeachment," wrote Rodham, "did not have to be for criminal offenses -- but only for a 'course of conduct' that suggested an abuse of power or a disregard for the office of the President of the United States...A person's 'course of conduct' while not particularly criminal could be of such a nature that it destroys trust, discourages allegiance, and demands action by the Congress...The office of the President is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."

deconstructing clinton… "just because I could"


(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU! FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME! 

Hamilton (or Madison) discussed the importance of wisdom and virtue in Federalist 57. "The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust."

(Contrast this with clinton, who recklessly, reflexively and feloniously subordinates the common good to his personal appetites.)

Because the Framers did not anticipate the demagogic efficiency of the electronic bully pulpit, they ruled out the possibility of an MTV mis-leader (and impeachment-thwarter!) like clinton. In Federalist No. 64, John Jay said: "There is reason to presume" the president would fall only to those "who have become the most distinguished by their abilities and virtue." He imagined that the electorate would not "be deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism which, like transient meteors, sometimes mislead as well as dazzle."

(If the clinton debacle teaches us anything, it is this: If we are to retain our democracy in this age of the electronic demagogue, we must recalibrate the constitutional balance of power.)

THREE:

The president can be prosecuted for his alleged felonies after he leaves office. (Nota bene ROBERT RAY.)


"There are only two years left. What harm can he do?": Sen. Dale Bumpers


This clinton-created censure contrivance -- borne out of what I have come to
call the "Lieberman Paradigm" (clinton is an unfit president; therefore clinton must remain president) -- is nothing less than a postmodern deconstruction in which the Oval Office would serve for two years as a holding cell for the perjurer-obstructor.

Such indecorous, dual-purpose architectonics not only threatens the delicate constitutional framework -- it disturbs the cultural aesthetic. The senators must, therefore, roundly reject this elliptic scheme.

In this postmodern Age of clinton, we may, from time to time, selectively stomach corruption. But we must never abide ugliness. Never.

 

COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005


December 7, 1941+64

AN OPEN LETTER TO TIM ROBBINS, DAVID GEFFEN, CHRIS MATTHEWS, MAUREEN DOWD + JEANINE PIRRO

RE: a not-so-modest proposal concerning hillary clinton



Dear Concerned Americans,

Hillary Clinton's revisionist tome notwithstanding, 'living history' begets a certain symmetry. It is in that light that I make this not-so-modest proposal on this day, exactly 64 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The context of our concern today--regardless of political affiliation--is Iraq and The War on Terror, but the larger fear is that our democracy may not survive.

We have the requisite machines, power and know-how to defeat the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere, but do we have the will?

In particular, do we have the will to identify and defeat the enemy in our midst?

Answerable to no one, heir apparent in her own mind, self-serving in the extreme, Hillary Clinton incarnates this insidious new threat to our survival.

What we decide to do about Missus Clinton will tell us much about what awaits us in these perilous new times.

COMPLETE LETTER

December 7, 1941+64
Mia T
AN OPEN LETTER TO TIM ROBBINS, DAVID GEFFEN, CHRIS MATTHEWS, MAUREEN DOWD + JEANINE PIRRO
RE: a not-so-modest proposal concerning hillary clinton


COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005

 

HILLARY GOES NUCLEAR
PROLIFERATION IN THE AGE OF CLINTON

by Mia T, 5.30.06
 
 

For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers.

William J. Broad
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
The New York Times
May 30, 1999





Nuclear is now very much in the news as a potential power source because of its lack of contribution to global warming. If you look at nuclear energy, which currently provides 20 percent of our energy with virtually no emission of greenhouse gases, we do have to take a serious look, but there remain very serious questions about nuclear power... in a world with suicidal terrorists.

So I have real concerns, specifically about a plant in my state near where I live, Indian Point....

So we need to resolve... questions of... proliferation... before we go forward with nuclear power.

hillary clinton
Remarks at The National Press Club
May 23, 2006




illful nuclear proliferation, the product of clinton naiveté, corruption and obsession with legacy,1 was the predominant clinton policy for eight long years.2

Missus clinton's sudden concern about proliferation, therefore, is a decade too late and a dollar too cheap. 3

The clintons turned the dilemma of the nuclear age--how to exploit nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential while preventing the spread of nuclear weapons-- on its head: They exploited nuclear proliferation for their own gain even as they prevented the realization of nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential.

Moreover, by ignoring terrorism for those eight years,4 the clintons caused the nuclear dilemma to become even more acute, complex and deadly with the concomitant rapid rise in non-state actors' involvement in the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Contrary to the clintons' quaint theories,5 rogue states routinely violated their Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons nonproliferation obligations, setting up a perfect symbiosis for non-state actors--particularly terrorists--seeking to acquire and use nuclear or other WMD. The non-state actor is the rogue state's perfect WMD delivery-system: there is no return address.

"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'

I thought that my virtual obsession 2 with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him."

bill clinton
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live
THE (oops!) INADVERTENT ADMISSIONS OF BILL + HILLARY CLINTON

The clintons, almost singlehandedly, therefore, made proliferation of WMD today's preeminent threat to international peace and security.

Some call the clintons quislings, Manchurian Candidates, bought off in Little Rock by Riady and company6 decades ago (and much too cheaply, according to their Chinese benefactors7), trading our national security for their political power. This argument is persuasive but incomplete....

READ MORE



WAR AND TREASON AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

by Mia T, December 29, 2005

 

 

 





inch Sulzberger scurried to the C-SPAN confessional even as the fires raged under the mammoth heap of ash and twisted steel that was once the Twin Towers and 2801 human beings. He had to make certain no one would blame The New York Times.

The Times' 1996 endorsement of bill clinton1 was the problem. The endorsement, you may recall, was contingent on clinton getting a brain transplant--specifically of the character lobe.2 How could The Times square that shameful, irresponsible endorsement with this monstrous failure3?

Sulzberger quickly explained that The Times was able to endorse clinton by separating clinton's "policies" from "the man."4 (Did he actually buy into the clintons' 'compartmentalization' con5? Or was this apparent credulousness simply another cynical expedient for The New York Times?)

Probing questions by the host, Brian Lamb, followed, eliciting this damning historical parallel from Sulzberger: "The Times dropped ball during Holocaust by failing to connect the dots."

It appears that The New York Times doesn't learn from its 'mistakes.' 6 Will it take The Times another 50 years to understand/admit that by having endorsed for reelection a "documentably dysfunctional" president7 with "delusions" -- its own words -- it must bear sizeable blame for the 9/11 horror and its aftermath8

Sulzberger's carefully worded rationalization of the clinton endorsements points to clinton "policies," not achievements; is this tacit acknowledgement that clinton "achievements" -- when legal -- were more illusory than real -- that The Times' Faustian bargain was not such a good deal after all?

If we assume that the clintons are the proximate cause of 9/11 --- a proposition not difficult to demonstrate --- it follows that The New York Times is culpable, too.

Elie Wiesel makes a distinction between "information" and "knowledge."6 Information is data; it is devoid of an ethical component; it is neutral. Knowledge is a higher form of information. Knowledge is information that had been internalized and given a moral dimension.

At a minimum, The Times' failure -- whether concerning clinton endorsements, or classified leaks or the Holocaust -- is a failure to make this distinction. More likely though, it is a failure not nearly so benign.

 

 

December 7, 1941+64

AN OPEN LETTER TO TIM ROBBINS, DAVID GEFFEN, CHRIS MATTHEWS, MAUREEN DOWD + JEANINE PIRRO

RE: a not-so-modest proposal concerning hillary clinton



Dear Concerned Americans,

Hillary Clinton's revisionist tome notwithstanding, 'living history' begets a certain symmetry. It is in that light that I make this not-so-modest proposal on this day, exactly 64 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The context of our concern today--regardless of political affiliation--is Iraq and The War on Terror, but the larger fear is that our democracy may not survive.

We have the requisite machines, power and know-how to defeat the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere, but do we have the will?

In particular, do we have the will to identify and defeat the enemy in our midst?

Answerable to no one, heir apparent in her own mind, self-serving in the extreme, Hillary Clinton incarnates this insidious new threat to our survival.

What we decide to do about Missus Clinton will tell us much about what awaits us in these perilous new times.

COMPLETE LETTER

December 7, 1941+64
Mia T
AN OPEN LETTER TO TIM ROBBINS, DAVID GEFFEN, CHRIS MATTHEWS, MAUREEN DOWD + JEANINE PIRRO
RE: a not-so-modest proposal concerning hillary clinton


COPYRIGHT MIA T 2005






  1. October 27, 1996, Sunday Editorial Desk
    The New York Times
     
    Bill Clinton for President
     
    (EXCERPT)
     

    Today we endorse the re-election of President Bill Clinton. Readers of this page will know that we share many of the public's concerns about Mr. Clinton's resoluteness and sensitivity to ethical standards in government. But our endorsement is delivered in the unequivocal confidence that he is the best candidate in the field and in the belief that because he has grown in the job he can build on the successes of his first term while correcting its defects.

    Toward that end, our endorsement comes with a set of recommendations for how Mr. Clinton can, before Election Day, address voters' concerns about his personality and character....

    Ethics

    Obviously, we could not ask our readers to vote for Mr. Clinton without addressing his most significant leadership problem. Many Americans do not trust him or believe him to be a person of character. We do not dodge that issue, nor should Mr. Clinton. Indeed, he must view it as a prime opportunity of his second term. A fraction of the electorate, of course, will never forgive his reputation for philandering. But he can reclaim the trust of the great majority by demonstrating a zeal for financial integrity and for protecting the machinery of justice from politics. Toward that end, we urge Mr. Clinton to close the campaign with a series of dramatic gestures.

    First, he should accept the Republican dare and pledge not to pardon anyone convicted in prosecutions arising from Whitewater, the White House travel office firings, the mishandling of F.B.I. files, or the raising of funds for the 1996 campaign. He should promise that he, the First Lady and every member of the executive branch will cooperate with all investigations, whether they are from the Justice Department, special prosecutors or Congressional committees.

     Next, Mr. Clinton should deal with his party's Indonesian fund-raising scandal by acknowledging that both parties' financial practices are wrong even if not illegal. He can then credibly pledge to recapture one of the main themes of his 1992 campaign. We saluted then and we still believe in the stirring call in his inaugural address ''to reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people.''

    The Democratic Congressional leadership talked him into shelving campaign finance legislation because their members wanted to keep lapping up contributions from political-action committees.

    Now is the moment for Mr. Clinton to renew his promise by sponsoring campaign laws that end foreign donations and ''soft money'' dodges and that give all credible candidates a level playing field when it comes to mail and advertising.

    Such dramatic pledges would do more than defuse the criticisms of Mr. Perot and Mr. Dole in the closing days of this election. They would also enlist public opinion on Mr. Clinton's side as a protection against Republican excesses in the Congressional investigations that are coming whether Mr. Clinton opts for openness or sticks to the hunker-down strategy that has done his Administration such damage.

    More important, Mr. Clinton would be demonstrating that he regards winning on Nov. 5 as a necessary prelude to the important work that lies ahead. Mr. Clinton's original vision of a country where no one waits for health care, social justice and economic opportunity to trickle down is still valid. His education in the leadership burden that rests on the world's strongest nation and its President has proceeded more rapidly and successfully than anyone could have dared hope. The Presidency he once dreamed is still within his reach if he brings the requisite integrity to the next four years. By adding self discipline to vision, he can build on the achievements he has already made and make a fair bid to leave Washington in 2001 as one of the notable Presidents of the 20th century.

     



  2.  

     

    ...prior attempts at presidential brain surgery
    have proven less than brilliant.

    You will recall that, as recently as 1996,
    The New York Times insisted that
    Bill Clinton undergo the surgical procedure;
    its endorsement of Clinton was predicated
    on Clinton undergoing a partial brain transplant:
    specifically of the Character Lobe.
    Clinton assured us immediately (if tacitly)
    that this would be done post haste (or was it post chaste?),
    that whatever crimes he never did, he would never do again.
    If brain surgery was ever performed on Clinton,
    it has produced no discernible improvement.

    Perhaps our approach to the problem
    of deficient presidential brains
    is itself wrong-headed;
    that the problem is really
    a problem of deficient electorate brains.

    Voters would be wise to heed

    the old roadside ad:

    Don't lose Your head
    To gain a minute
    You need your head
    Your brains are in it.