Interesting "Gossip"

Not so much "gossip" as "interesting news which the regular media deems contrary to its partisan interests and thus refuses to report."

Clinton, you will be shocked to hear, has actually been less than candid regarding a story he's been telling for years (third item):

[Clinton alleges that Harvard professor Roger Porter said to him:] "The press has to have somebody in every election, and we're going to give them you. . . . We'll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out."

Porter said he did work on a friendly basis with the then-governor of Arkansas on education, and once -- a year before the purported July 1991 conversation -- joked that Clinton should run for president as a Republican because he was too moderate for his own party. Porter, who works with the White House Historical Association, bumped into the former president just last week at the unveiling of Clinton's portrait. There was no mention of the story, which Clinton has been recounting to aides for years. "The fact that Bill Clinton has now repeated this story over and over does not make it true, although I suspect it has now become a legend in his own mind," Porter said.

Fascinating.

Let's be realistic here, shall we? Everyone is the hero of his own life story; few people actually think of themselves as "The Villain" in someone else's story. Almost everyone casts his lawbreaking, lies, and betrayals as justified in the context of his own life. Witness Bill Clinton.

It is simply implausible -- it is precisely contrary to normal human behavior -- for someone to think he's doing wrong.

It is ridiculous that someone both believes himself to be doing wrong and then proudly admits this to the person to whom he is doing wrong.

I've had enemies in my life. (Well, not "enemies," but whatever.) None of them -- not a one -- ever came up to me and said, "I think what you're doing is just swell and the best for everyone, but I'm going to oppose you because of my own very cynical and unprincipled motives."

And yet this keeps happening to Clinton and his associates. Mild-mannered Harvard historians tell him "We're going to get you." Ken Starr walks up to James Carville at an airport and loudly proclaims "We're going to roll your boy." "Roll," of course, means "mug," and "mug" doesn't mean "oppose through principled and ethical means."

Um, yeah.

Not even Darth Frickin' Vader told Luke Skywalker "I'm doing this because I'm evil." He justified his actions in terms of finally bringing order to the galaxy.

And yet Roger Porter and Ken Starr both spontaneously confess their evil motives to Clinton and his paid mouthpiece.

And on a very related note, read the first bullet-pointed item at the end to find Joe Biden making a heroic declaration to Cheney and Rumsfeld that they should resign due to their incomptenece, who are both so cowed by his righteous indictment that they endorse his statements by their guilty silence.

One would almost suspect that these people are makin' shit up on the fly.

Unbelievable! It Just Happened to Me Update: Joshua Micah Thomas Chandler Estevez Oakenshield Marshall just wrote me an email stating that he knows his position on Iraq is wrong -- "viciously wrong," in his own words -- but that he's deliberately undermining the war effort, and America's national security, "only to unseat George W. Bush for unpatriotic partisan reasons."

Wow. Okay, now I believe.

Goodness Gracious! Another one! Wonkette just Telexed me to admit that she's not very funny at all and grievously overhyped and that, in her words, "if there were any justice in the world your site would be much, much bigger than mine."

Then she offered me anal. Which I thought was quite generous of her, really.

There's a Law of Comedy That a Premise May Be Used Three Times Before It Gets Annoying Update: All right, now Oliver Willis just sent me a Cheese-o-Gram from Hickory Farms along with a note stating that he reads me everyday, "just to see what actual politically-oriented comedy looks like," and is an enormous fan.

And here's the kicker: Then he offered me anal, too. He says he's not gay or anything, but that I've "just earned that right on the basis of [my] D&D post alone."

Thanks, Odub! I'll let ya know!

posted by Ace at 02:20 PM

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