Here is why we elected Bill CLINTON - CBS Sunday Morning today. [View all]

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.