Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the longest-running Southern Gothic soap opera in American history! It is a mix of “Days of Our Lives,” “Dr. Phil,” “The Sopranos,” “Oprah,” and “Judge Judy” all rolled into one, long, endless saga called “The Clintons — a Tale of Naked Ambition, Unquenchable Libido, Towering Greed, and Their Desperation to Be a Part of Every American’s Life as Long as We Live.”
It is about 20 years on from being “The Young and the Restless.” It has become “The Old and Relentless.” Washed Up. Won’t stop talking. Won’t stop spinning. Won’t stop lying. Won’t stop taking money.
The characters, well, William Shakespeare could not have thunk them up. Machiavelli would have blushed before he created such shameless creatures. And William Faulkner would have found all of their incestuous webs of shenanigans confounding. “Too confusing,” he would have written in the margins of the screenplay.
And once these current monsters are gone (if they ever leave us alone) we already have two more generations of them following along in the family business. It is safe to say that not a single American alive today will ever live a day when the pestilence of the Clintons is not somewhere making noise, spinning, lying and taking huge pots of cash for it.
And it’s not just the Clintons themselves, though they are increasingly intolerable. It is all the grifters and charlatans and criminals who fade in and out of the shadows of Clinton World. Actually, they never seem to fade out. The Clintons are the Hotel California of politics. You can check in but you can never check out!
Welcome to Clinton World! Such a lovely place!
Take little George Stephanopoulos. Good looking boy. Seems like a nice young man. Kid was great in The War Room. 1993! But he is not a kid anymore! He is old now! He has white hair, to go with that $105 million contract from ABC News, from which he can make donations to the Clintons that most Americans slave their whole lives to giving half that much to their local church.
He plays the do-gooder, ernest shyster. Writes the book about how the libidinous Bill Clinton’s intern-chasing ruined the great government they had built together. He was excommunicated from Clinton World for it, of course. But now, two decades on, we pull back the curtain and there he is! Eyes big, bright tie, talking earnestly into the camera. But still his little triangular snout is deep into the Clinton slop.
Then there is gunfire in Libya. Smoke. Fire. A dust storm. A strongman dictator is executed in public. Clinton World arrives on the scene. Hillary is in charge. Clinton operatives fan out. Tent flap is pulled back. And there, silent, anonymous in the darkened corner — IS SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL! I imagine him wearing a tablecloth-patterned kafiya, with only his eyes showing.
So, what is longtime Clinton apparachik Blumenthal doing in Libya?
“We were thinking, ‘OK, Qaddafi is dead, or about to be, and there’s opportunities,’ ” a Blumenthal associate told The New York Times. “We thought, ‘Let’s try to see who we know there.’ ”
But therein lay the problem. They needed an inside edge. Enter Blumenthal, who is writing lengthy email missives to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the whole situation in Libya.
“It was just so factionalized over there,” another business associate told The Times. “You never knew who to believe or trust, or know who was in charge of what.”
He was talking about the Libyans. But he could have been talking about the Clintons.
Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com and on Twitter at @charleshurt.
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