"[George Magazine's] purportedly post-partisan stance seemed to many people naïve."

"'Ultimately, you can’t have a political magazine that doesn’t have a politics,' Victor Navasky, then the publisher of The Nation, told The New York Times in an article headlined 'George Wins Readers, but Little Respect.' Arguably, the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was the publication’s undoing. In the spring of 1998, when the independent counsel Ken Starr was deep in his investigation of the Clinton White House, George published a puffy cover story on the film 'Primary Colors,' an adaptation of the roman à clef about Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign. (For a brief while, America had its own Elena Ferrante in Joe Klein). The magazine further showed its hand when it referred to the under-fire president as the 'chief charmer.' When Mr. Kennedy and his staff tried to cover the imbroglio, they made choices that would now seem cringe, like publishing a write-around article about Ms. Lewinsky’s past accompanied by a full-page caricature of her biting into a hot dog."

From "The Lasting Appeal of John F. Kennedy Jr./A CNN documentary and an upcoming series by Ryan Murphy delve into the nation’s most famous son, who remains fixed in the 1990s" (NYT)(gift link, so you can see the whole story... and all the beefcake pix of the famously gawked-at boy).

Why is it so difficult to find that caricature of Monica Lewinsky biting into a hot dog?

Google gives me 2 pix of Obama stuffing something into his mouth and one of Reagan. This is the most obvious caricature idea for Lewinsky. You'd think dozens of lame efforts would show up in this search. And George Magazine published one. Where is it? Is Google caring for our presumed devotion to the beloved boy? I mean John John. Not that rogue Bill!

Now doesn't Bill Clinton need to sue The Daily Mail... or is that exactly what he must not do?

I'm reading "Bill Clinton sent 'warm and gushing' letter for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday - as Trump sues over claim he also wrote a 'bawdy' note for paedophile's half-century" in The Daily Mail.

Bill Clinton wrote a 'warm and gushing' letter which was included in Jeffrey Epstein's infamous 50th 'birthday book', The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The former US president was one of hundreds who contributed to a heavy leather-bound, gold-embossed album of letters that Epstein's ex-lover Ghislaine Maxwelltook more than a year to compile leading up to the landmark date.

Is this Book of Bawdy letters real or not? The Wall Street Journal, by presenting it as real, attracted a $10 billion lawsuit from Donald Trump. Wouldn't you think that would make The Daily Mail more careful about asserting that the book exists and that it contains a letter that is really from the person who purportedly wrote it?

"We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program," said JD Vance.

Quoted in "Vance says U.S. 'not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program'/President Donald Trump said Saturday night that the U.S. had dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites, the first time the U.S. has directly attacked Iran" (NBC News).

I'm interested in that rhetorical device: "We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program." 

I believe it's called paradiastole — or redescription. Other examples: 

George W. Bush, 2003: "We’re not occupying Iraq. We’re liberating it."

Barack Obama, 2013: "This is not a war on terror. It’s a campaign against specific networks like al-Qaeda."

Bill Clinton, 1999: "This is not a war. It’s a humanitarian intervention."

Benjamin Netanyahu, 2014: "We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We’re fighting Hamas.”

Ronald Reagan, 1980s: "We’re not waging war against Nicaragua. We’re supporting freedom fighters."

"He's much more self-aware than he lets on in public.... Everything I've ever not liked about him was — I swear to God — absent at least on this night with this guy...."

"I've had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected... And he mostly steered the conversation to: What do you think about this?... There were there were so many moments when I hit him with a joke or contradicted something and no problem.... I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him.... I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump.... I feel it's emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days.... My favorite part of the whole night was: We were standing in the Blow Job Room*... and he said 'You know, I've heard from a lot of people who really like that we're having this dinner — not all, but a lot.' And I said "Same — lot of people told me they loved it — but not all.' And we agreed. The people who don't even want us to talk: We don't like you. Don't talk? As opposed to what? Writing the same editorial for the millionth time and making 25-hour speeches into the wind?"

When Bill Clinton was King.

Sounds familiar https://t.co/umL0MKczTa

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 15, 2025

ADDED: There was a budget surplus when Bill Clinton left office, and we now have a deficit counted in trillions, and the national debt is in the tens of trillions. Those who don't like the service Elon Musk is giving to his country — what is their alternative? 

"When the going got rough, I tried to imagine that I was one of those big inflatable toys of the cartoon figures Baby Huey or Casper the Friendly Ghost."

"You could knock them down and they always bounced right back up."

Wrote Bill Clinton, quoted in "In ‘Citizen,’ Bill Clinton gives his side of the story/The former president’s memoir aims to set the record straight, with varying results" (WaPo). 

I was inspired to work on an illustration (with Grok):

"The whole thing is hard for me to write. I couldn't sleep for two years after the election. I was so angry, I wasn't fit to be around."

"I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage, which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn't be changed...."

Writes Bill Clinton in his new book, quoted in "Bill Clinton makes stunning confession about his bizarre behavior after Hillary's defeat in America's 'darkest election'" (Daily Mail).

Presumably, he means he didn't sleep well. The assertion that he couldn't sleep for 2 years is patently untrue. He's still alive.

Clinton also writes in a mode that would be called "election denialism" if it were pro-Trump: "Almost two years after the election, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a highly regarded social scientist said Russia's cyber attacks piled on top of Comey's interventions were effective enough to persuade voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to vote for third parties or stay at home. If so, Putin's enablers were Comey and the political press."

What about the Russia hoax that Hillary participated in?! Shouldn't that balance the effect of "Russia's cyber attacks"?

What were the "cyber attacks"? Here's Kathleen Hall Jamieson's book, "Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know" (Amazon Associates link). From a 2018 New Yorker article about that book:

"Usha and J.D. made a memorable pair. The legal writer David Lat remembers attending a poker night with the couple in 2011..."

"... at the neo-Gothic home of [Amy] Chua and her husband, fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld.... At the time, Chua was mainly known for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a gaily provocative paean to achievement-oriented parenting. Chua was a kind of den mother to certain student protégés, known on campus as 'Chua pets,' and J.D. was central among them. According to another former friend of the pair, Chua was not a fan of Usha. 'Probably because she didn’t engage in her bullshit,' the former friend said. 'You have to gossip and drink. J.D. loved that shit.' Usha did not. Lat happened to ride the Metro-North up from New York for the poker game with the soon-to-be Vances. He told his husband later that night that they’d reminded him of another famous Yale Law couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. 'They had a kind of energy to them,' Lat said. 'They seemed very confident and successful. One thing that struck me as Hillary-esque was that Usha seemed to have more polish than J.D.'"

From "What Is Usha Vance Thinking? The veep candidate’s wife is the child of immigrants, a former Democrat, a highly skilled lawyer — and a total mystery" (NY Magazine).

I don't like this random worker being embarrassed. She didn't ask to be exploited as scenery.

Just a pro-tip for Kamala campaign staffers...

When you film Bill Clinton going to a McDonalds for a campaign stop... you might want to edit out the part where the cashier thinks he's Joe Biden.

What a complete mess. pic.twitter.com/NEKdBVWjs9

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 14, 2024

ADDED: "Oh, my God! It's Bill Clinton!"

"Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were both born in 1964, the very last year of the Baby Boom."

"Yet many in that cohort feel no identification with baby boomers. But neither are they Gen Xers. They are people in-between. Perhaps in 2024, this status now enables public figures to be 'in between' in new ways, to wear their gender more lightly."

Those are the last few sentences of "Paying More Attention to His Appearance Than Hers/They’re the same age, but pundits and voters can’t stop talking about how much older Tim Walz looks than Kamala Harris. It’s not the only way her running mate seems to be absorbing some of the scrutiny usually heaped on female candidates" by Rhonda Garelick in the NYT.

That's from August 12th. I was looking for something else when I ran into that, and I got engrossed.

The idea of wearing one's gender lightly intrigues me.

What was I actually looking for? I was thinking about the time President Bill Clinton, running for reelection, wanted to use federal spending to incentivize public schools to require their students to wear uniforms.

My search terms — Clinton, school, and uniform — all came up in that Harris/Walz article:

... Hillary Clinton... came to prominence as first lady, as a “wife,” and was assailed for her hair and style, her presumed disrespect for “cookie baking” and for tolerating her husband’s transgressions.

... Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, was called “a hectoring schoolmarm” for offering expert policy explanations, and advised to change her glasses and hair.

... Ms. Harris hews generally toward a sleek uniform of pantsuit, silk blouse, pearls and heels, which “suggest fashion without being too fashionable”...

The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

Jon Stewart daringly but silently calls Bill Clinton a sexual predator... then coyly laughs about it.

Comedian John Stewart is now calling out the hypocrisy at the DNC. pic.twitter.com/zfzfltVmp3

— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) August 24, 2024

Stewart is getting points for bravery.

At the DNC: Bill Clinton stamps his presidential approval on Joe Biden: "And he kept the faith, and he's infected a lot of the rest of us."

"He healed our sick and put the rest of us back to work. And he strengthened our alliances, for peace and security. He stood up for Ukraine. He's trying desperately to get a ceasefire in the Middle East. And then he did something that's really hard for a politician to do. He voluntarily gave up political power. And George Washington knew that. And he did it. And he set the standard for us serving 2 terms before it was mandatory. It helped his legacy. And it will enhance Joe Biden's legacy. And it's a stark contrast to what goes on in the other party. So I want to thank him — for his courage, compassion, his class, his service, his sacrifice. Joe Biden, thank you. And he kept the faith, and he's infected a lot of the rest of us. Now let's cut to the chase. I am too old to gild the lily. Two days ago I turned 78. The oldest man in my family of 4 generations. And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I'm still younger than Donald Trump...."

On the topic of things George Washington knew... or things we think George Washington knew... George Washington knew that he was still wanted. He wasn't abandoned and bullied into leaving. But I presume part of the pressure that Joe Biden experienced was the argument that only if he left quietly could he receive this comparison to George Washington. It's hard to imagine George Washington influenced by the prospect of a laudatory speech comparing him to some other leader. That sounds like an insult to George Washington.

"Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight."

Said Michelle Obama, at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

Quoted in "Walz’s 'couch' quip, and Democrats’ growing comfort in going low/The Democratic VP nominee’s apparent reference to a lewd, fake internet story reflects a more bare-knuckle campaign against a GOP presidential nominee who has spent years plumbing new depths." That's an essay by Aaron Blake, at WaPo.

It gets my "civility bullshit" tag, because civility has been advocated in the past, and Democrats are in a phase where they see an entitlement to reject it.

This also gets my "masturbation" tag. Who would have predicted that Democrats would lean heavily into masturbation shaming? It's 30 years since Bill Clinton fired Jocelyn Elders!

I love that Kai Cenat used the word “blogs” in his rant.

Have you noticed "Kai Cenat Claims Kamala Harris, Secret Service Are Attempting To Contact Him/'I don't know goddamn sh*t about politics.... I don't know nothing!" (Vibe)(" I’ve never done anything with politics and these blogs are like 'Yo, you’ve got to do this sh*t Kai'—And it’s all the top blogs")?

I remember 18 years ago, when blogging was new and the high-level bloggers got in line:

Bill Clinton, lunching with the bloggers.

Come on, you'd fly to New York City, to eat "southern chicken" with Bill Clinton and pose for a group photo, wouldn't you? And then you'd go home and blog about how he's good on your issues and how you're totally impressed, right? And, omigosh, "He's got beautiful blue eyes."

I tried to warn them, but my message — stay independent, preserve your authentic voice — got overwhelmed by some very weird stuff. I got — as we used to say back then — swarmed. But I've survived, in my own way, all these years, on my own terms.

Good luck to Mr. Cenat, who is only 22. He was 4 when Bill Clinton was wrangling the bloggers, so social media was always a normal part of life for him. How can someone so young have any idea of the difference between real and fake and to know how precious real is? I wish him well.

"She doesn’t look around for others to join inasmuch as she simply reflects the moment: the thrill, the fun, the catharsis, the you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall of it all."

Robin Givhan is writing about Kamala Harris's notable laughing, in "Kamala Harris’s powerful laughter in the face of weirdness/Her guffaws speak to a moment: the thrill, the catharsis, the you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall of it all" (WaPo).

There's that word "weird" again, in the headline. I checked to see if maybe Givhan resisted using it herself. Givhan is a wordsmith. You can tell by that one sentence I put in the post title. She went with "inasmuch," and she made one of those long adjectives that hyphens let you construct out of any string of words: "you-have-to-laugh-to-keep-from-crying-or-punching-a-wall." But she's not a got-to-avoid-using-the-word-of-the-day wordsmith. 

I'd hoped "weirdness" was a just-in-the-headline word, inserted by one of those nameless headline writers, but it's in the body of the essay:

How weird is it to deride a person for laughing? Not for laughing inappropriately, in the middle of a funeral, for example...

The link goes to the "Mary Tyler Moore" Chuckles the Clown episode, not — how could it be?! — Bill Clinton laughing at Ron Brown's funeral (laughing, then fake-crying). 

... but simply for enjoying a good chuckle?

But sometimes it is inappropriate — and quite mystifying — as in this widely shared example:

 

Givhan acknowledges the word-of-the-momentness of "weird":

"As for a President's unofficial acts, there is no immunity. The principles we set out in Clinton v. Jones confirm as much."

"When Paula Jones brought a civil lawsuit against then-President Bill Clinton for acts he allegedly committed prior to his Presidency, we rejected his argument that he enjoyed temporary immunity from the lawsuit while serving as President. Although Presidential immunity is required for official actions to ensure that the President's decisionmaking is not distorted by the threat of future litigation stemming from those actions, that concern does not support immunity for unofficial conduct. The 'justifying purposes' of the immunity we recognized in Fitzgerald, and the one we recognize today, are not that the President must be immune because he is the President; rather, they are to ensure that the President can undertake his constitutionally designated functions effectively, free from undue pressures or distortions. '[I]t [is] the nature of the function performed, not the identity of the actor who perform[s] it, that inform[s] our immunity analysis.' The separation of powers does not bar a prosecution predicated on the President's unofficial acts."

From the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, issued this morning.

Where is the line between official and unofficial in the charges against Trump? The lower courts rushed through the question, which means the issues are not properly developed for the Supreme Court:

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Bill Clinton famously explained, defending himself for having said under oath that "there's nothing going on between" him and Monica Lewinsky. He continued: "if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement."

I'm reminded of the ballsy precision of Clinton's defense as I read the NYT live reporting from Day 1 of the Hunter Biden trial:

[Abbe] Lowell, Hunter Biden's lawyer... implies that the present tense of the question about drug use on the form to buy a gun — the verb “is” — means the government must prove Biden was getting high at the exact time he bought the gun.

It's called the Rule of Lenity.

Let me quote a SCOTUSblog piece from 2016, "The Court after Scalia: The Rule of Lenity":

"I think he’s praying. But if he is sleeping, you know, he certainly looks pretty while he sleeps."

Said Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, reacting to Congressman Robert Garcia, who'd had some reason to point out that Trump seems to be sleeping some of the time at his criminal trial, reported at Mediaite.

This exchange took place at the same House Oversight Committee meeting where Marjorie Taylor Greene sneered at Jasmine Crockett's false eyelashes and Crockett shot back with a butch-phobic remark about MTG's body.

The most outré quotes come from the Oversight Committee.

"Biden’s Catholic faith should make him a natural middle-grounder..."

"... but his personal qualms about abortion have zero policy substance since he abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, and he’s planted himself to the left of secular Europe on transgender issues.... Biden is only now considering a Trump-like executive order on border crossings....  [T]he White House is reluctant to put any clear distance between itself and climate activists.... 'If you like your gas-powered car, you can keep your car' is a simple, politically effective formulation. Yet somehow the Biden administration has ended up with 'If you like your gas-powered car, you’re a clueless antiquarian' instead. One explanation for this pattern is that Biden’s White House is staffed by progressive ideologues.... The greater freedom that Trump enjoys has roots in some dark places — cynicism, conservative tribalism, a populist indifference to policy detail...."

Writes Ross Douthat in "Why Can’t Biden Triangulate Like Trump?" 

I clicked on that headline as soon as I saw it, so I'm surprised to see it's dated April 13th. Since I scan the front-page headlines at the NYT every day, I have to think Biden's failure to "triangulate" is something the editors wanted buried. By the way, "triangulate like Trump" is funny, considering that Bill Clinton was the original triangulator. No mention of Clinton in Douthat's column.