"I will be honest,” he said [in the interview with Judy Woodruff], “the Franken case, for me, was a difficult case, a hard case... There may be things I don’t know. But maybe I’m just an old-fashioned person, but it seemed to me that there were 29 women on ‘Saturday Night Live' that put out a statement for him, and that the first and most fantastic story was called, I believe, into question... Too late to wade into it now.... I mean, I think it’s a grievous thing to take away from the people a decision they have made, especially when there is an election coming up again... But it’s done now."... but the implication is undeniable.
I laughed at the phrase "I will be honest" and went into my Bill Clinton impersonation, "But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again..." I love unbelievable intros to lying.
Also, "grievous" was a great word to nail the quote into memory. It would have been easy to say "terrible" or "awful" or even "dreadful." But "grievous"! There's a word. What are our associations with "grievous"?
I think of the great Marc Antony speech in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar":
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;And Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons in 1940:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it...
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be..."And — more evocative of the sufferings of Monica Lewinsky (and her privileged counterpart Hillary Clinton) — Nora in Ibsen's "Doll's House":
Nora: It's true Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion. If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it. He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house -
Helmer: That's no way to talk about our marriage!
Nora [undisturbed]: I mean when I passed out of Papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything to suit your own tastes, and so I came to have the same tastes as yours.. or I pretended to. I'm not quite sure which.. perhaps it was a bit of both -- sometimes one and sometimes the other. Now that I come to look at it, I've lived here like a pauper -- simply from hand to mouth. I've lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. That was how you wanted it. You and Papa have committed a grievous sin against me: it's your fault that I've made nothing of my life.
Posts
40 comments:
I found those quotes by searching for "grievous" at Goodreads, which I was railing against the other day for misattributing quotes (to Maya Angelou and Dr. Seuss), but I think these quotes are all good (unless you want to say that all of "Shakespeare" is misattributed to Shakespeare).
The Democratic memo went out to the journolist: No Impeachment. Apparently the polling was disastrous.
America needs a mood ring, to reflect women's moral leadership.
What are our associations with "grievous"?
Grievous Angel: The Gram Parsons Story
I think of the Act of Contrition, a prayer from my Catholic upbringing: "Through my fault...through my most grievous fault."
Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare is pretty good and will disabuse any thinking person of the idea that he didn't write his plays. He was drilled in rhetoric hours a day at school and had exposure to the classics from which he drew much of his material.
By exposure, I mean read them in the original.
"I think of the Act of Contrition, a prayer from my Catholic upbringing: "Through my fault...through my most grievous fault.""
Yes, I thought of The Book of Common Prayer:
Almighty God,
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
maker of all things, judge of all men:
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins
and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable.
Have mercy upon us,
have mercy upon us, most merciful Father;
for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake,
forgive us all that is past;
and grant that we may ever hereafter
serve and please thee in newness of life,
to the honor and glory of thy Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
@ Althouse - WOAH!!!!! I think you will need to do the Act of Contrition for quoting Winston Churchill and tagging Ward Churchill. One of these things is not like the other, as they used to sing on Sesame Street.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
All things said, Clinton was a worse rascal than he was a President. But he was a liar of the first water. About Trump, however, he speaks the truth. The impeachment path leads to civil war and it would be a grievous affair.
General Grievous from Star Wars.
“I love unbelievable intros to lying.”
Don’t tell Chuck. The bumpkins — blue staters with advanced degrees — eat that stuff up.
50 Shades of Grievous.
That is truly great blogging. I have a sense that lyin' Billy had a lot to do with launching you into a critique of at least some aspects of progressive politics, and that in turn contributed to your becoming a blogger. You're back on one of your main themes again.
If some action is grievous then you probably will have a grievance. Like Newton's Law: if one object exerts a force on another object, then the second object exerts an equal and opposite reaction force on the first.
When you have a grievance, you feel that you have been wronged. There is only ONE thing to do. Make it right. Get even. Get your 'grievance' on.
I think what Bill is saying if you over turn all those voter's votes and nullify an election, there will be some pretty grievous consequences from the people.
Blogger Earnest Prole said...
"The Democratic memo went out to the journolist: No Impeachment. Apparently the polling was disastrous."
I've always wondered how the rudderless Democrats manage to coordinate their talking points and narratives.
Good grief !
I think that several things are going on there with Clinton. He knows Trump personally, and even if not good friends, shares the bond of being President with him. He is also a superb political strategist, and sees what would happen to his Democratic Party if they continue down this path. There is a saying that if you strike at the king, you had better kill him. Here, while it would make a lot of the left feel better if Trump were impeached, just for, essentially beating Clinton's wife, the numbers make removal for anything short of serious federal felonies all but impossibles. The Dems flip the House, and vote out Articles of Impeachment, what happens? It fails in the Senate, which requires 67 votes. That means at least, probably, >15 Republicans voting with the Democrats, which, since impeachment would he a nakedly partisan move, highly improbable. Then, in 2020, with an enraged Trump base, Trump wins more decisively than in 2016, and the House flips back Republican, giving them a bigger margin than they have right now, and their Senate majority is probably notched up as well. In short political suicide on the part of the Dems that even Nancy Palsie is now warning about impeachment, if she ever has a chance again of the Speakership.
The entire defense of Clinton by the Democrats comes down to "Republicans pounced."
If you believe Juanita Broaddrick and five contemporaneous witnesses, all of whom risked prison for lying, he might have said if he took #METOO seriously.
By the way, why should we be any better than them? What a campaign theme!
I'm against impeachment too when there's no high crimes or misdemeanors.
From the grievous to the grievance is but a step.
Blogger Earnest Prole said...
The Democratic memo went out to the journolist: No Impeachment. Apparently the polling was disastrous.
Yes, Bill is a much better politician than the idiots running the Democrat Party and he knows that, down that road lies disaster.
It is getting pretty late to change course and I think the Democrats are heading into heavy weather on the issue of what they want to do with the country. So far, I see nothing for them to run on.
California and its primary should be a warning.
I'm will be honest: you have garnered a whole bunch of grievous usages that support your point, but you have still not garnered sufficient evidence that Clinton is wrong. The people of Minnesota were grievously deprived of their Franken, and Senator Al was most piteously slain.
We need to go light on those "Trump speaks the truth" hits. Trump certainly says approximately what a lot of people think, but we shouldn't confuse that with the truth. Trump puts a lot of opinion out there.
Did you see his impromptu press conference? He called Comey a liar at least three times, and no one other than Trump even mentioned his name. This pardon-fest gambit is hilarious. The man could do anything! Manafort just needs to keep his head on his shoulders.
"... but you have still not garnered sufficient evidence that Clinton is wrong. The people of Minnesota were grievously deprived of their Franken, and Senator Al was most piteously slain."
Where did I say he was wrong about Franken and not removing elected officials?
I was keying off your mockery of Clinton's "I will be honest" intro. I wasn't precise in my lame attempts to use "garner" and "grievously" to excess, capped with a "piteously".
From the annals of truncated quotes:
Bill Clinton said...
But maybe I’m just an old-fashioned person, but it seemed to me that there were 29 women on ‘Saturday Night Live' that put out...
Bill Clinton: "I'll be honest, I didn't have sex with that woman!"
Remember that folks? National TV, Paula Jones disposition where he said that under oath to!
He was so honest he gave North Korea nuclear reactors to make the bomb. So honest he and Hillary invented the 'Clinton Foundation'. So honest he and his wife ripped off hundreds of people in payoffs as well as the nation via graft.
His is lower than whale shit.
Bill Clinton has character issues but is, at least, benign. His wife is malignant.
Paul, IIRC, what Clinton said was, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". His definition of sexual relations did not include blow jobs.
Forcible rape is not benign, look at the evidence before you decide that it didn't happen. Look at the under oath testimony of her coworker who found her crying and bleeding with torn clothes. There are four additional witnesses.
He is a great liar and deciever.
His position is that they are all nuts, sluts, and lying whores. Think about that.
The people of Minnesota were grievously deprived of their Franken, and Senator Al was most piteously slain."
Franken was "elected" by a ballot box in the proverbial Democrat car trunk. Lyndon Johnson was "elected" by ballot box #13 in San Antonio that had the voters poll tax numbers in numerical order.
"Deprived" is relative in Democrat World.
Bill Clinton is your problem, Althouse. He’s not my problem. I never voted for him. I never defended Clinton. I think Clinton is s shameless liar. He deserved every bit of the trouble he saw in his second term.
Bill Clinton has never been, and never will be, any impediment to my criticizing Trump on similar grounds of immorality and illegality.
On the substance though Clinton is right. When we discussed it I said Franken should not have resigned.
The use of the word "grave" or "grievous" is diplomatic speech indicating the most serious level of response will be forthcoming should the situation not change in a manner considered positive by the one calling the other side's actions grievous or promising grave response.
It is a warning of war.
In other words, Clinton is using his own non-eviction from the White House here to argue that the voters MUST remove Trump. Big surprise, Clinton wants Trump to lose the next election.
Post a Comment