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As of 2008, Bill Clinton had made $29.6 million in advances and royalties for his 1008 page autobiography (and miscellaneous quasi-books). Yet, I could barely finish reading his memoir’s opening sentence, with its 11 prepositional phrases:
“Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.”
In the pirated edition of Clinton’s My Life published in China, the impatient Chinese translator rendered Clinton’s first sentence as:
“The town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui.”
And from my 2011 review in VDARE of Bill Clinton’s new book Back to Work:
On p. 6 of Back to Work, I tripped over a sentence of 85 words. Alerted, I began to keep track of Clinton’s XXXL-sized sentences. By page 20, I had found additional leviathans of 91, 105, 110, 98, 118, and a round 200 words. I decided to give up counting. But, then, on pp. 23-24, Clinton lets loose with a blue whale of a sentence comprising 346 words.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
This aversion to simple declarative sentences is why James Ellroy really hates Bill Clinton.
It fascinates me how Christopher Hitchens was obsessed with how much the Clintons lied. He was a pretty cynical man about politicians and thought them all liars, but he thought the Clintons went above and beyond normal political lying to another level.
Slick Willie always impressed me as a man who loved to hear himself talk. Every syllable just cloys with, “Aren’t I wonderful?!”
BTW, the "I love me." philanthropy of shoveling millions to already hyper-rich "non-profit" organizations is common with the the Crony-Elites as Malcolm Gladwell notes:
http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-revisionist-history-donate-princeton-vassar-bowdoin-tipping-point-outliers-blink-2016-7
This from the man who read _Dreams from my Father_ more carefully than anyone else on the planet.
Bubba’s overall style (including his speaking and writing) is a love-hate style: either it sounds eye-rollingly over-the-top treacly and fake, or else you’re so in the bag that you think it’s as beautiful as being a second grader hearing your teacher read The Giving Tree. There really is no in-between.
I recall during the Atlanta Olympics, Bill Clinton’s eyes “teared up” during the processions in a moment of pure stagecraft fakeness. It was so over-the-top, where-are-the-cameras that a person I was watching it with—who voted for him twice, and was a pretty solid Democrat–rolled her eyes and said, “Oh he’s so oily and fake.”
The Lefty gushing for Clinton’s hokey nonsense reminds me of how so many lefties gushed about Obama’s autobiography, calling it the greatest political autobiography of all time and such nonsense. Ann Althouse ripped Michelle Goldberg a new one over this, as she challenged Goldberg to show how Obama’s pablum was so much better than normal political pablum. Goldberg couldn’t and was obviously very sheepish and embarrassed (this was in some sort of video chat/debate).
Heck, it reminds me of how many lefties called Obama a great speaker. You listen to him, and you go, “Not bad, not good, nothing special, just ordinary polished political oratory.” To hear lefties talk of him, however, you’d think Winston Churchill stepped aside and gave Obama his place amongst great orators.
Obama was great at giving candidate speeches in 2007-2008 because he's really, really fascinated with himself. The whole thing was also, to be frank, a pretty interesting phenomenon; I saw him speak in West Philly a few weeks before the election and it was thousands of people crammed into a few blocks of quasi-ghetto street corners and I think there was a real sense of everyone there of wondering whether a black guy was really going to be elected President.
He's been a mainly undistinguished speaker as President, due largely to repetition and an absence of new themes, and because he tends to coast and preen when he feels like he's winning. I liked the 2010 State of the Union and the second 2012 debate; in both cases recent political setbacks (losing Ted Kennedy's seat in 2010 and performing terribly at the first 2012 debate) put him back on his heels a bit and made him a little more interesting and invested.
Then there is Obama the debater and public speaker not reading from his teleprompter.
https://youtu.be/poz6W0znOfk
We've seen him off teleprompter several times. He usually sounds like a blathering stuttering fool. I think his IQ is in the ball park with Dubya, and few points below. This is not a guy who thinks quickly and nimble on his feet.
Length isn’t actually all that closely related to readability, which is more about how closely ideas are connected to each other within the sentence. The founding fathers and their era of writers often had a quite clear prose style (adjusting for changes in vocabulary and ideas about the world), and of course sentences like this one are hardly impenetrable:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
True, and if you can pull it off, you can pull it off, and those 18th and 19th c. talents were good at it. It is much easier to do with the spoken word than the written word, though. That is why, schmaltz aside, Bill is easy to listen to, despite being long-winded.
And as a footnote, we should perhaps note that Charles Dickens wrote 'A Tale of Two Cities' an ocean away from, and a full 83 years after, the Declaration of Independence.
(Except for the second amendment's confusing verbiage)
“Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm”
Frankly I couldn’t give a shit what the weather was like the day I was born, or the day any of my children were born. Why the hell does the former Narcissist-in-Chief think anyone cares what it was like the day that he was born?
It was a dark and stormy night……
Clinton should have hired Bill Ayers as his ghost-writer.
In his speech at the Democrat convention tonight Bill showed real promise as a romance novelist. Seeming to drift into a sort of reverie, he reminisced about the way he met Hillary at Yale and was immediately captivated by her physical and intellectual charms, and how throughout their long marriage he has loved, cherished, and respected her. By the time he finished, we had a whole new understanding of the relationship of this devoted couple.
Of course, the skilled storyteller understands that knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to put in, and Bill sure left out a lot.
Bill is good at sounding off the cuff because he really is talking off the cuff a lot of the time. He spoke to a group of Americorps volunteers I was in, in 99, right after Columbine, and he veered off topic to connect us to the massacre in a way that was pretty funny in retrospect. (“Those boys in Colorado had beef; all of us got beef, I’m sure all of y’all have beef with something or somebody, but it’s a choice of whether and what we choose to do with it,” was the flavor as I remember it.)
Obama was great at giving candidate speeches in 2007-2008 because he’s really, really fascinated with himself. The whole thing was also, to be frank, a pretty interesting phenomenon; I saw him speak in West Philly a few weeks before the election and it was thousands of people crammed into a few blocks of quasi-ghetto street corners and I think there was a real sense of everyone there of wondering whether a black guy was really going to be elected President.
He’s been a mainly undistinguished speaker as President, due largely to repetition and an absence of new themes, and because he tends to coast and preen when he feels like he’s winning. I liked the 2010 State of the Union and the second 2012 debate; in both cases recent political setbacks (losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in 2010 and performing terribly at the first 2012 debate) put him back on his heels a bit and made him a little more interesting and invested.
There’s evidence that Clinton was involved with CIA drug trafficking through Mena, Arkansas. Proceeds from these drug sales were used to fund the Contras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mena_Intermountain_Municipal_Airport#Allegations_regarding_Bill_Clinton
Clinton was a CIA asset, much like Obama and both Bushes.
Jimmy Carter and JFK were 2 presidents who attempted to stand up to Deep State machinations. JFK ended up assassinated. As for Carter, his attempts to get the Iranian-held hostages released were foiled by the CIA.
Of course, JFK was enormously hostile to the CIA after he was tricked during the Bay of Pigs.
President Eisenhower warned us about the growth of the military-industrial complex, which controls our government even through today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mena_Intermountain_Municipal_Airport#Allegations_regarding_Bill_Clintonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXVDEn3gsQ
Clinton was a CIA asset, much like Obama and both Bushes.
Jimmy Carter and JFK were 2 presidents who attempted to stand up to Deep State machinations. JFK ended up assassinated. As for Carter, his attempts to get the Iranian-held hostages released were foiled by the CIA.Replies: @JohnnyWalker123, @Forbes
Carter fired 25% of the CIA, following evidence that Oswald and the CIA had worked together (with the mafia families, FBI, military, LBJ). This is what led towards the CIA having a rivalry with him.
Of course, JFK was enormously hostile to the CIA after he was tricked during the Bay of Pigs.
President Eisenhower warned us about the growth of the military-industrial complex, which controls our government even through today.
This is a man who had a girl young enough to be his daughter do this in the Oval Office, and you’re concerned about his penchant for long-winded sentences?
Either she was a consenting adult, or she was not. We can disapprove, but he does not have to care.
He should be gone after for the nonconsensual acts he has been repeatedly accused of, but howling about the legal stuff is a waste of breath.Replies: @FX Enderby
Except for, maybe, Jack Cashill.
And I’m just sitting here wondering how you have a clear sky in the early morning. Isn’t the early morning dark?
Malcolm Muggeridge, in his excellent autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, glossed a few times on the virtually incomprehensible oratory of Ramsey MacDonald, and on the fact that this Scottish bumpkin, ostensible champion of the Socialist cause, ever ready to drop the right tear-jerking phrases in his sing-song accent, had by the end of his career quite unapologetically adopted every look and habit of the English aristocracy, and that the hypocrisy seemed an especially telling indicator of what the man and his movement really had been all along.
The case of Bill Clinton is reminiscent in certain ways.
Similarly, the top post on David Stockman’s blog today is an old essay of his entitled “Hillary Clinton: Class President of a Failed Generation.” That metaphor hits the nail perfectly on the head in my opinion.
Ellroy may be on to something; the fact that Slick Willy can’t form a short declarative sentence unless under extreme duress–and even then it’s almost always a lie (“I did not have sex with that woman”). That’s a pretty good sign that Bubba has completely internalized the politicians’ two-faced mindset and uses vague and emotional prolixity to deny people a straight answer.
It fascinates me how Christopher Hitchens was obsessed with how much the Clintons lied. He was a pretty cynical man about politicians and thought them all liars, but he thought the Clintons went above and beyond normal political lying to another level.
True enough, but after hearing Bill rhapsodize about Hillary this evening, I’m sure he was thinking about Hillary all the time Monica was doing that to him.
I’m not sure it’s all Bill. Robert Gottlieb was Clinton’s editor. Also Robert Caro’s editor. Long, long sentences seem to be a Gottlieb signature.
Julius Caesar was another politician who wrote like that. If you read his commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars, he would write these paragraph-long sentences, full of colons and semicolons, always refering to himself in the third person. The difference between Julius Caesar and Trump, however, is that Julius Caesar actually had the literary genius to pull of this uber-pedantic style. Clinton is an absolutely terrible writer.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Anonymous
True, and if you can pull it off, you can pull it off, and those 18th and 19th c. talents were good at it. It is much easier to do with the spoken word than the written word, though. That is why, schmaltz aside, Bill is easy to listen to, despite being long-winded.
And as a footnote, we should perhaps note that Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ an ocean away from, and a full 83 years after, the Declaration of Independence.
I haven’t listened to whole lot of political speeches but I sat through Bill’s tonight. And though I hate to say it, I see why everybody seems to say he is the most natural politician of his era. He’s a master at homey, which seems the main attribute to shoot for in American political oratory.
Bill Clinton (“William” to his peers) is a hardcore devotee and obsessive reader/collector of Hegel’s works and rare volumes. So he naturally emulates his prose style. You know, cuz he’s such a genius Rhodes scholar. Um, probably…
Seriously, though – why the heck doesn’t his ghostwriter clean up his ramblings and make them easier to read?
For the sake of posterity could you post that 346 word sentence?
They proposed (1) to cancel the still-unspent portion of the "failed" stimulus, in spite of nonpartisan studies findng that the stimulus had created more jobs than predicted and kept unemployment lower than it would have been; (2) to repeal the financial reform bill with its provisions to require banks to maintain more capital to cover potential loan losses and to avoid future bailouts by establishing a liquidation procedure that would hold stockholders and management more accountable for them (so repeal would make both failures and the bailouts the Tea Party claims to deplore more likely in the future); (3) to repeal incentives to rebuild our manufacturing base through green technologies and instead rely on more drilling for oil and gas, mining coal, and spending on heavily subsidized nuclear power;* (4) to repeal the student-loan reform law, ending direct government lending, giving a 90 percent government guarantee to banks to make loans, rendering them more expensive, thus increasing the costs to taxpayers eliminating the most important part of the law--the part that allows students to repay their debt as a small percentage of their income for up to twenty years, so they won't ever have to drop out again for fear they'll never be able to repay their debt; (5) to repeal the health-care reform law, including the requirement that insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums people pay on health-care costs (80 percent for smaller plans), not on profits or marketing; to reverse the so-called cuts in Medicare, which were actually lower increases in reimbursement rates to providers, especially in the Medicare Advantage program, where the profit margins of the participating private providers were large; and, having given the money back to the providers, to reopen the so-called doughnut hole in the senior citizens' drug program and reduce the solvency of Medicare by a few years;*, and (6) to both cut taxes again, largely for upper-income citizens, and still reduce the large annual deficit by making very large but unspecified cuts in nondefense, non-Medicare spending.Replies: @Stan Adams
Caesar was not writing for a mass audience. He knew he was one of the greatest men in history and was writing for posterity. Bill just tossed his nonsense off for a few million bucks. Remember Hillary said they were broke when they left the White House.
Caesar was also writing for more personal, immediate political gain.
Caesar saw the writing on the wall for the republic, and realized the nation would either collapse or fall into dictatorship. But he also knew that many of the senators despised dictatorship and proudly held to the memories of their ancestors overthrowing the kingship for a republic—this was Brutus’s ostensible motivation in murdering him.
So Caesar’s commentaries were designed to convince the upper classes (the ones who could read) that Caesar was not only totally justified in his actions, but was excellent at both war and leadership. It was an attempt to put himself forward as the best candidate for the permanent dictatorship/strongman position he saw Rome drawing towards whilst also trying to persuade the anti-dictator coalition that, if long-term dictatorship had to happen, Caesar was probably the best man for the job, and they might accept him grudgingly.
Of course, that Caesar’s gambit failed. Augustus learned this lesson, and instead of putting himself forward most of his life as an obvious natural strong man and heir to Caesar, he kept himself in the shadows and portrayed a persona of a weak boy until he had assuredly crushed any possible opponents. It was only then that Augustus portrayed himself publicly as a god and as great.
Caesar’s writings were a pioneering move in politics: never before had a politician used personally written propaganda to support future endeavors. Memoirs/Biographies of politicians past endeavors existed, but no one used them to justify future actions.
As one podcaster put it, it always seemed that Caesar was playing politics on a whole ‘nother level than everyone else.
She might have been half his age, but he was over 42, right?
Either she was a consenting adult, or she was not. We can disapprove, but he does not have to care.
He should be gone after for the nonconsensual acts he has been repeatedly accused of, but howling about the legal stuff is a waste of breath.
I read a couple of volumes of Robert Harris’ trilogy of historical novels about Cicero. In the first book, Cicero repeatedly outsmarts all his rivals. In the second volume, Cicero starts getting into conflicts with Julius Caesar and gets repeatedly outsmarted.
Cicero strikes me as the equivalent of a brilliant Washington insider: he can bend the rules to his liking, but only so long as society agrees it won’t break those rules. He was a rabbit.
Caesar could bend the rules well enough himself, but realize that rules were also made to broken—especially rules long since past their usefulness. Like Mao, he realized that political power ultimately came out of the barrel of a gun.
Frankly I couldn't give a shit what the weather was like the day I was born, or the day any of my children were born. Why the hell does the former Narcissist-in-Chief think anyone cares what it was like the day that he was born?Replies: @Olorin
Making details relevant distinguishes solid prose from the more obese stuff.
If being born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm meant, say, that the roof had been ripped off the hospital, that’s interesting. Especially if, say, his Widowed Mother had to fight off, say, flocks of seagulls trying to steal the afterbirth or Baby Willie himself. Or if these were the same seagulls that had made her a widow. Or if the Julia Chester Hospital was also a seabird rehab facility, and the seagulls had come from the ward down the hall. Or if there was something special about Texas versus Arkansas seagulls.
As it is, none of these details matter one bit, and you wind up wanting to slap his confabulating self-absorbed snout with rolled-up barbwire.
When people go to that much trouble to supply unimportant details about themselves and everything they do, sometimes it’s narcissism. Sometimes its misdirection and lying. I suspect more the latter. BS and huckstering. Gaslighting.
There is Obama the Bloviator (OTB) reading from his teleprompter.
Then there is Obama the debater and public speaker not reading from his teleprompter.
We’ve seen him off teleprompter several times. He usually sounds like a blathering stuttering fool. I think his IQ is in the ball park with Dubya, and few points below. This is not a guy who thinks quickly and nimble on his feet.
Clinton’s life story could be told by plagiarizing Johnny Rivers.
I washed my hands in muddy water washed my hands but they didn’t come clean
Tried to do like daddy told me but I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream
Either she was a consenting adult, or she was not. We can disapprove, but he does not have to care.
He should be gone after for the nonconsensual acts he has been repeatedly accused of, but howling about the legal stuff is a waste of breath.Replies: @FX Enderby
The sleaze really grates because Bill poses as an unselfish paragon of morality. The endless harangues about how we need to reorder our lives to live up to “our values” are particularly irritating coming from the Clintons. Btw, if Hillary wins it might kill him. Bill needs to retire his willy.
In other words, people they see as suckers.Replies: @e
Right. How many legions did Cicero command?
If the sky is clear you can see the stars. If it’s cloudy you can’t.
Wow, no wonder pundits and ordinary folks alike have had problems with Clinton’s truth telling over the years. He sort of does himself in by digging a hole even further (e.g. using more words than necessary than if he were telling the truth). Also, contrast this with Trump’s speaking style. Trump basically uses short declarative statements when speaking. People understand him, and he appears to have a better overall record on telling the truth.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Just state things without going on and on with tons of prep phrases, etc.
I’ll try it.
Trump is doing better in the polls than before his convention because he made a good acceptance speech.
Dave Kingman deserves to be in the HOF. His record speaks for itself.
Hey, I like this. Short sentences make the point better than dozens of words can.
“The Eighty-Minute Hour” by Brian Aldiss has a truly magisterial 400+ word parenthetical sentence explaining how Josip Tito was actually a British secret agent. The whole novel is a masterpiece.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @Anonymous
The need for a well-written constitution being self-evident, the founders could not have mistakes.
(Except for the second amendment’s confusing verbiage)
The longest sentence I’ve ever read was the first one in Martin Chuzzlewit. It’s several pages long.
Luckily, Dickens does it for the same reason as Clinton, to impress the reader, and he quickly gives it up and writes normally for the rest of the book.
Smug, sanctimonious self-congratulation is what the bogus Clinton Foundation is all about. Bill Clinton is an Über-Reptile in many dimensions including smug sanctimony.
BTW, the “I love me.” philanthropy of shoveling millions to already hyper-rich “non-profit” organizations is common with the the Crony-Elites as Malcolm Gladwell notes:
http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-revisionist-history-donate-princeton-vassar-bowdoin-tipping-point-outliers-blink-2016-7
Don’t you love it when Bill or Hillary refers to those Americans “who work hard and play by the rules.”
In other words, people they see as suckers.
I suspect that she’ll have him killed so that she can get some sympathy votes.
Bill Clinton is like an old magician who has performed the same trick too many times.
People aren’t buying it like they once did.
Long ago I decided to allot no more than five minutes of my precious time on earth to anything that either of those two had to say. Last night was no different. I will say, though, that when I saw him raise his index finger to make a point it brought back memories of January 1998.
I think that prose style is Clinton’s true voice. A friend of mine was speaking at a function where Clinton was also a guest. He said Clinton approached him backstage and began telling a story. At one point my friend said “that’s a really great point,” in response to something Clinton said. He said Clinton was visibly angry that he had dared to interrupt even that much. He said Clinton went on talking for 45 minutes without anyone else in the small group saying a word.
I heard Fidel Castro was the same way at a dinner party. Gabriel Garcia Marquez complained that he never got to talk during dinner with Fidel.
A couple of days ago I encountered in Belloc’s biography of Thomas Cranmer a sentence described by Belloc as “probably the longest ever written in the English language.” This, from what Belloc believes to be one of the greatest of all prose stylists: the author of the “Book of Common Prayer.” Intolerability of long sentences reflects more on the attention span of the reader than skill of the writer. What makes the bloviations of Clinton and Obama noxious is their banal, gaseous, trite content and occasionally their botched syntax, rather than sentence length per se.
Once, complexity of syntax was an art form, akin to poetry, in a way. I loved DeQuincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” as a teenager. The beauty of his prose (and eccentricity of personality) were things I aspired to, although fell far short of.
Monica Lewinsky must have something planned. It’s a matter of if she’s going to step up now, or wait until the debates. I’m gonna bet the debates.
I’m basing my bet on the fact that no woman who has been destroyed by another woman, who has a chance at sweet revenge, will ever pass up the once in a lifetime opportunity.
Jaunita has already stepped up again, so that’s probably all she’s got. But something well-timed, that includes a vagina, is waiting to be revealed. Monica, or someone else.
Bill’s Pedophile Island adventures are strangely absent from the running narrative also. How can nobody be willing to step up to the media podium to tell their tails. I don’t think it’s possible.
There’s some big nasty hairy element in the narrative that’s not out… yet.
Wild Card – Wikileaks
Really? Full of colons and semicolons? Did he prefer the Oxford comma or not?
In other words, people they see as suckers.Replies: @e
Yeah, and love it when Bill talks of marriage. HA!
He’s saving it for his Letters to Penthouse submission.
Southerners are always long winded, as you can tell by this Georgia court transcript that is making the rounds, that takes 20 pages simply to establish that the defendant wishes to appear pro se.
If you don’t have the time to read, listen to the audio transcription: definitely NSFW.
The case of Bill Clinton is reminiscent in certain ways.
Similarly, the top post on David Stockman's blog today is an old essay of his entitled "Hillary Clinton: Class President of a Failed Generation." That metaphor hits the nail perfectly on the head in my opinion.Replies: @Cryptogenic
OT: You need to activate your blog. Seriously.
He was referring to the Hope that’s on Somerset Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mena_Intermountain_Municipal_Airport#Allegations_regarding_Bill_Clintonhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXVDEn3gsQ
Clinton was a CIA asset, much like Obama and both Bushes.
Jimmy Carter and JFK were 2 presidents who attempted to stand up to Deep State machinations. JFK ended up assassinated. As for Carter, his attempts to get the Iranian-held hostages released were foiled by the CIA.Replies: @JohnnyWalker123, @Forbes
Since such a “negotiated delay” would have occurred during the 1980 presidential campaign, where Casey was the campaign manager and Bush was the VP candidate. Certainly evidence that either were in Paris would be necessary for such allegations. Crickets?
It's certainly plausible, and it's not as if JW123 is making it up. The allegation that GHWB and Reagan's National Security Team (with or without his knowledge) negotiated a deal to delay the release of the hostages was made by both the hostages themselves, and Iranian insiders.
Frankly, GHWB is spooky as hell and it fits. The Iranians have been saying it for decades. The only rational conclusion, "Forbes", is that it is very possible, highly probable, but ultimately unknowable thanks the cowardice of Congress and the complicity/venality of Big Media in the country.
They're all compromised.
Are you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/opinion/bill-clintons-fake-chinese-life.html?_r=0
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109165539666883155
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/my-name-big-watermelon-i-like-china-this-girl-monica-very-fat-26222923.html
Steve Sailer:
“I read a couple of volumes of Robert Harris’ trilogy of historical novels about Cicero. In the first book, Cicero repeatedly outsmarts all his rivals. In the second volume, Cicero starts getting into conflicts with Julius Caesar and gets repeatedly outsmarted.”
Julius Caesar was actually a child prodigy, according to Suetonius. He was writing poems in both Latin and Greek at age 5. At 16, he was a doctor in Roman Law and could match wits with Hortensius, Rome’s most famous attorney at the time. While Cicero was Rome’s most eloquent speaker, no one could match Caesar when it came to the written word. However, Caesar’s greatest mental skill was his tact. He had a demonic ability to “read” people and get them to do what he wanted. His biggest skill was making people eat at the palm of his hand. In terms of mental skill sets, he was a generalist rather than a specialist, a jack-of-all-trades. He studied military tactics and was a cunning tactician. He knew a lot about jurisprudence, and was a master prose stylist and at rhetoric. Besides Latin and Greek, he also knew several Gallic and Germanic dialects. While in Alexandria, he took an interest in astronomy and created a new calender based on it. He was exceptionally intelligent, but he did not focus on any given thing, but rather was very knowledgeable on many things, and used his smarts for whatever suited him at the time. He played the role of coarse soldier to win the affection of the men under his command, but he was nothing of the sort.
Funny how Cashill, ridiculed at the time as the worst sort of conspiracy nut, has seen his basic theory about Dreams become established dogma.
Well, it may not be proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but Banisadr, Iran’s President back then, has been saying and writing for decades that was indeed the case.
It’s certainly plausible, and it’s not as if JW123 is making it up. The allegation that GHWB and Reagan’s National Security Team (with or without his knowledge) negotiated a deal to delay the release of the hostages was made by both the hostages themselves, and Iranian insiders.
Frankly, GHWB is spooky as hell and it fits. The Iranians have been saying it for decades. The only rational conclusion, “Forbes”, is that it is very possible, highly probable, but ultimately unknowable thanks the cowardice of Congress and the complicity/venality of Big Media in the country.
They’re all compromised.
Are you?
Bill’s sentences struck at him. They were long. They were dirty. Jim snarled. Jim fought. Jim got dragged down by them. Down into the dark. Jim beat them back. Got back into the light. Jim hated Bill. Jim loved Bill. Jim hated Bill. The hate washed away the love. He got out. He got into the car. The sun was setting. The air was yellow. The highway was slow and full of dark thoughts. He lit a cigarette. He’d never vote again.
Here it is:
They proposed (1) to cancel the still-unspent portion of the “failed” stimulus, in spite of nonpartisan studies findng that the stimulus had created more jobs than predicted and kept unemployment lower than it would have been; (2) to repeal the financial reform bill with its provisions to require banks to maintain more capital to cover potential loan losses and to avoid future bailouts by establishing a liquidation procedure that would hold stockholders and management more accountable for them (so repeal would make both failures and the bailouts the Tea Party claims to deplore more likely in the future); (3) to repeal incentives to rebuild our manufacturing base through green technologies and instead rely on more drilling for oil and gas, mining coal, and spending on heavily subsidized nuclear power;* (4) to repeal the student-loan reform law, ending direct government lending, giving a 90 percent government guarantee to banks to make loans, rendering them more expensive, thus increasing the costs to taxpayers eliminating the most important part of the law–the part that allows students to repay their debt as a small percentage of their income for up to twenty years, so they won’t ever have to drop out again for fear they’ll never be able to repay their debt; (5) to repeal the health-care reform law, including the requirement that insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums people pay on health-care costs (80 percent for smaller plans), not on profits or marketing; to reverse the so-called cuts in Medicare, which were actually lower increases in reimbursement rates to providers, especially in the Medicare Advantage program, where the profit margins of the participating private providers were large; and, having given the money back to the providers, to reopen the so-called doughnut hole in the senior citizens’ drug program and reduce the solvency of Medicare by a few years;*, and (6) to both cut taxes again, largely for upper-income citizens, and still reduce the large annual deficit by making very large but unspecified cuts in nondefense, non-Medicare spending.
https://books.google.com/books?id=-S2JCDOpgXYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:kEtwPJDEb6oC&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMh6uds5fOAhVDMyYKHa0kDd0Q6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=%22profits%20or%20marketing%22&f=false
Earlier, Google Books let me read those pages; now, it will not. But you can see in the search results that it's the text I quoted.
They proposed (1) to cancel the still-unspent portion of the "failed" stimulus, in spite of nonpartisan studies findng that the stimulus had created more jobs than predicted and kept unemployment lower than it would have been; (2) to repeal the financial reform bill with its provisions to require banks to maintain more capital to cover potential loan losses and to avoid future bailouts by establishing a liquidation procedure that would hold stockholders and management more accountable for them (so repeal would make both failures and the bailouts the Tea Party claims to deplore more likely in the future); (3) to repeal incentives to rebuild our manufacturing base through green technologies and instead rely on more drilling for oil and gas, mining coal, and spending on heavily subsidized nuclear power;* (4) to repeal the student-loan reform law, ending direct government lending, giving a 90 percent government guarantee to banks to make loans, rendering them more expensive, thus increasing the costs to taxpayers eliminating the most important part of the law--the part that allows students to repay their debt as a small percentage of their income for up to twenty years, so they won't ever have to drop out again for fear they'll never be able to repay their debt; (5) to repeal the health-care reform law, including the requirement that insurance companies spend 85 percent of the premiums people pay on health-care costs (80 percent for smaller plans), not on profits or marketing; to reverse the so-called cuts in Medicare, which were actually lower increases in reimbursement rates to providers, especially in the Medicare Advantage program, where the profit margins of the participating private providers were large; and, having given the money back to the providers, to reopen the so-called doughnut hole in the senior citizens' drug program and reduce the solvency of Medicare by a few years;*, and (6) to both cut taxes again, largely for upper-income citizens, and still reduce the large annual deficit by making very large but unspecified cuts in nondefense, non-Medicare spending.Replies: @Stan Adams
By the way, that is an actual quote from pages 23-24 of Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy (2011), by Bill Clinton.
https://books.google.com/books?id=-S2JCDOpgXYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:kEtwPJDEb6oC&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMh6uds5fOAhVDMyYKHa0kDd0Q6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=%22profits%20or%20marketing%22&f=false
Earlier, Google Books let me read those pages; now, it will not. But you can see in the search results that it’s the text I quoted.
Please elaborate.