LYING DEFINES THE CLINTONS, JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES:
When my dog caught a rabbit at Hillsdale College a couple years ago, I was horrified. I’m no hunter and I don’t like seeing cute things kill other cute things. But when I yelled at my Carolina swamp dog, she looked at me with a single clear conviction she wanted to impart: You don’t understand — this is what I am about.
Lying is what the Clintons are about.
And, no, I’m not talking about Bill Clinton lying about his “relationship” with Monica Lewinsky, or the numerous credible accusations that he was a sexual predator. Bill earned the name “Slick Willie” long before he questioned the meaning of “is” or claimed that while Lewinsky had made sexual contact with him, he had not had sexual contact with her.
Bill lied with half-truths, whole lies, whole truths wrapped in deceptive contexts. He was like the air-traffic controller in Airplane! when handed a weather bulletin just off the wire. Lloyd Bridges asks, “What do you make of this, Johnny?”
Johnny replied, “I can make a hat! I can make a broche! I can make a pterodactyl . . .”
Well, like the replicator in Star Trek that just moves molecules around to make you any meal you want, Bill Clinton can pluck nouns and verbs from the air and serve them as if they were hot steamy piles of truth.
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Now I am being a bit unfair to Hillary Clinton. She is not a born liar the way Bill is. Bill is the Michael Jordan of lying. Lots of people can score baskets. But Jordan was in a class by himself both for his skill and his ability to make it look fun.
With the possible exception of barking like a dog, Hillary Clinton doesn’t make anything — anything — look fun. She even makes being married to a fun guy seem unfun. (I should say, he’s probably more to blame for that.) Hillary lies as much as Bill, but she’s more like Larry Bird; she gets the job done, but no one would call it graceful. (Caveat: Sports analogies are not my forte so my apologies if this misses the mark like a volleyball falling short of the goalposts.)
There’s no doubt the Clintons have made a career of it, but how much of their lying to advance both their own careers and the Democrat agenda of the moment unique to the Clintons, or systemic to “Progressivism” itself – or 21st century power politics in general? As Victor Davis Hanson has written, “Obama is the most impressive sophist of his age,” and as Jonah goes on to write, Donald Trump is the “F6 Tornado” of maximum chaos, but the Clintons’ tenure in Washington paved the way for both men.