Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

�

Click here for the Secret Decoder Ring to this issue!

Become a
Paid Mullings Subscriber!

(To join the FREE mailing list or to unsubscribe Click Here)

Bedeviled by a Blue Dress

Rich Galen

Friday November 19, 2004

Click here for an Easy Print Version

From The Kansas Agri Business Expo
Wichita, Kansas

The Clinton Library opened yesterday. In the rain. Headline writers had a field day.

The Chicago Tribune's read, "The Naked Truth from Little Rock."
WAFF.com from Huntsville, Alabama had one which read: "Hillary Clinton says Husband Excited to Open Library"
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Clinton Library Unveils Display"
Newark Star-Ledger: "Bill Clinton's Good-Times Museum
Arkansas Business On-Line: "Clinton Encourages Little Rock to Make Hay From Library"

And like that.

Sitting in the Wichita Airport watching CNN, I was struck by how silly President Clinton looked standing in the rain, at a podium, at the opening of his library with a soldier holding an umbrella over his head.

See? This is what happens: You send Carville and Begala and Lockhart and Sosnik and Greenberg and McCurry to help manage the losing Kerry campaign and there is no one left to ask the threshold question, "What if it rains?"

Don't misunderstand what was going on: Bill Clinton was reminding everyone that when it comes to the Democratic Party in the United States he is still the capo di tutti capo.

Finito.

Some spoilsports argue that the Clinton Presidential Library doesn't spend enough space on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Right. Should the library have tried to buy the blue dress on Ebay? How about a continuous loop video of Clinton admitting he lied?

SIDEBAR

In an interview with ABC News Clinton is quoted as having said he never "lied to the American people about my job."
The man is a parsing genius.
Extra Credit Assignment: Pick a word - describing the movement of air - which, if inserted between "my" and "job" renders Mr. Clinton's statement wholly inaccurate.

END SIDEBAR

Presidential libraries are not, have not been, and never will be confused with real libraries. True, they are repositories of millions of pages of documents and tens of thousands of artifacts but they are wholly devoted to � being devoted.

Senator Hillary Clinton was on TV early yesterday morning marveling over the fact that while most Americans will never go to the White House, any American can go to the Clinton Library and visit an actual replica of the Oval Office.

This, after asserting she had been to the libraries of all the living ex-Presidents. She must have forgotten that the Gerald Ford museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan has an Oval Office replica.

If you go to the Clinton Presidential Library website and, if you are a goofball like me and you type in the word, "Lewinsky" in the search box, you get 154 hits.

Number two on the Lewinsky hit parade is from a "Religious Leaders Breakfast" in the East Room on September 11, 1998. Mr. Clinton was asking for forgiveness in re: The Lewinsky Matter, saying, in part:

"I must have God's help to be the person that I want to be; a willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek; a renunciation of the pride and the anger which cloud judgment, lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain."

As evidence of his sincerity, this excerpt from the ABC interview last night regarding Kenneth Starr:

"No other president ever had to endure someone like Ken Starr indicting innocent people, because they wouldn't lie, in a systematic way, and having respectable news outlets treat them like they were serious, and parroting everything they leaked.
"No one ever had to [deal with] all the other problems I dealt with, while every day, an entire apparatus was devoted to destroying him."

Sounds like a whole lot of blamin' & complainin' but not much forgivin' a-goin' on up there to Little Rock.

Final point: Mrs. Clinton said that the design of the building is representative of Clinton's "Bridge to the 21st Century" theme.

If you look at the photo on the official library website you can come to one of two conclusions: It is either a bridge to nowhere, or it's a double-wide.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A link to the Clinton Library web page, and a photo of the Double-wide in case you don't want to end up with a Clinton Cookie on your computer, also a forgettable Mullfoto of the AirTrans gates in at the Atlanta airport and an unworthy Catchy Caption of the Day.

Current Issue | Secret Decoder Ring | Past Issues | Email Rich | Rich Who?