Here is why we elected Bill CLINTON - CBS Sunday Morning today.
It's been since 1992 since I thought of him with the pure rush of signing-on for somebody in the earliest primaries. The morning after the first debate, I encountered some neighbors with Arkansas plates and gushed to them, "Your governor is *fantastic* !" And they said thank-you in a calm tone. In those innocent years of mine I didn't imagine that they might not be the partisans based on geography. And my glow got back to regular support when all the "bimbo explosions corrected to eruptions" (not MY words so don't castigate me) went off, summed up later at the end of Primary Colors where the Kathy BATES character says to him, "We saved you this time. Don't go breaking our hearts (again)." With the sub-text there being the suspicion that he would do just that.
And to get this out of the way, when the BJ storm hit, at my insignificant level of happy hour influence I was his fierce defender, seeing the whole thing as only a partisan warfare thing, blinders on regarding the Power and "morality" issues, compartmentalizing (to use CLINTON jargon). Privately, alone, I was totally pissed at him, on the grounds that winning power is so hard and becomes a transiently precious *opportunity* above all to achieve our agenda, which he totally blew (to coin a phrase). And, to be clear, my defending him against the Repukes didn't extend to smearing LEWINSKY, although I despised her. It came down for me that both of them were selfish jerks. I despised all of the characters involved, still remember Lindsey GRAHAM's graciously smiling in ushering in CLINTON for the interrogation.
When it was over it was back to our having survived at the "breaking our hearts (again) " stage, and was just glad to have him stashed in the background and on his own to defend himself with what popped up. In the interval since he had a Dismissed status for me. We had Shrub to detest. And the unremarked phenomenon of all the feet of clay in anybody we previously considered heroes - the uncovering of everybody's sordid proclivities, the KENNEDYs, LBJ, even FDR. The internet has left nobody unscathed - history is just gossip. I'm not a Fundamentalist morality hypocrite, just that some level of appropriate behavior might be considered to be consensus? Who knew what was going on in the movie Wall Street loos during working hours? (Not me.) About the only ones who have gone unscathed so far are TRUMAN, McGOVERN, SANDERS, CARTER and the like. I have separate issues with Jimmy - how he broke down the Separation of religion from the public forum, how he had a nest of vipers at his breast (Chris MATTHEWS, Pat CADDELL, David RUBENSTEIN), and most of all - separate from the possibility that he might be gigged for linear thinking/mistakes - that he made RAYGUN possible.
So this morning, CLINTON and his best seller novelist partner were peddling their latest, nothing there for me. But after that and a couple of different segments, CLINTON was brought back alone, and with conciseness and brilliance, he summed up our current disaster with the KRASNOV era. We're accused of only having our detestation of KRASNOV as an agenda - him living in our brain and TDS. He demolished that scenario and pointed a way up and out. It was back to 1992.
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I was feeling my blood boil when I heard the framing of "Democrats only agree on one thing" as if a fact (along the lines of "when did you stop beating your wife"
. Bill's answer was perfect, "If I thought that were true it would make me mad, but it's not true" and then the rest of his answer as he expanded on that was great. Other Democrats need to take lessons from Clinton on how to answer these gotcha questions. Don't mealy-mouth your answers, and hem and haw. Call the media out without equivocation.
Much like Clinton's answer to the interviewer's question framing Biden's cognitive decline as fact versus rumor and innuendo. I've seen many Democrats go on TV and hem and haw with answers like "Well, I didn't see the President that often" or avoid answering with "Americans care about XYZ". They need to answer like Bill Clinton, "No, I never saw him with any indication of cognitive decline. In fact, he was always well-versed on his briefings. I just saw him recently and he was in good shape." I'm paraphrasing, but Clinton's answers were firm and not wishy-washy. That's what we need.
He spoke a lot of good facts in spite of the reporter trying to lead him down some kind of rabbit hole. You could almost see the delight on her face when she started talking about Tapper’s book and hoping to bash Biden, and Clinton didn’t bite. He knows Joe. He knows Joe is OK. I love Bill’s use of language. He said they go in there “throwing their weight around”. That’s an expression I’ve used about them often. I think they’re only picking on Joe like this because they’re too chicken to pick on Trump. We need to make more chicken noises at these guys. 
