By: Joe Conason
Like a seasonal flu, the verbal virus that is sometimes called Clinton derangement syndrome has struck again, beginning only moments after the 42nd president of the United States appeared on television screens around the world with the two journalists he had helped to rescue from prison in North Korea. And like certain viruses, the syndrome tends to hit hardest among a very specific segment of the population. Most Americans appear to be immune most of the time, as do the majority of human beings on the planet, so this pathology will probably never become a global pandemic.

But pundits everywhere — from the newsrooms of the “liberal media” to the blogosphere to the Republican noise machine — seem to be the preferred hosts of the pathogen. While not lethal or physically disabling, it troubles their minds — and strikes the same people over and over and over again. Symptoms include the recitation of dull sexual japes, sour reflections on celebrity, mindless pronouncements on foreign policy, false accusations of grandstanding, and even furious attacks on innocent individuals who dare to express admiration or gratitude to Bill Clinton (on this particular occasion for saving their lives).

On display in the wake of his successful effort to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is the purest and most virulent form of a disorder all too familiar to anyone who lived through the Clinton presidency.

Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America — a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.

But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton.” Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton “hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home.” Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that “the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton” (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton’s mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was “some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy.” And not for the editors of the Huffington Post, who posted a very strange headline — “Bill Upstages Hillary … Once Again” — on an Associated Press story that didn?t mention her at all.

Liddy tells joke about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee” “being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton”

Here is Watergate THIEF G. Gordon Liddy: Obama Was Born in
The Kenyan Slum of ‘MUMBASA.’ Mombasa! ..Idiot!

On Greta, Eagleburger chides Fox coverage of Clinton’s North Korea visit: “I thought they were going to wet their pants”

Analysts have long speculated on the sexual envy that may or may not predispose the syndrome’s sufferers to say these things. What seems clear, however, is that no matter what humanitarian acts Clinton may perform in his post-presidency, he cannot do anything without provoking such inappropriate and embarrassing outbursts. The result, of course, is that their remarks always reveal more about them than about their intended target.

Consider the reaction of the former president’s former advisor Dick Morris, who still pontificates on the Fox News Channel airwaves as a Clinton expert, although he hasn’t spoken with either of them for more than 10 years. Denouncing Clinton’s trip as “awful” and “ridiculous,” he suggested with a sickening grin that Ling and Lee should instead have been left to “live with the consequences of their acts” — essentially a death sentence in a hard labor camp. (Is that what any Fox commentator would say in the unlikely event that any of their colleagues had the guts to try to report on life in North Korea — and got arrested?)

John Podhoretz didn’t go quite that far in Commentary, but he too felt deeply disturbed by Clinton’s achievement. As a “journalist” who spends most of his life watching television and eating ice cream, he felt moved to mock Ling and Lee for seeking to expose the dark side of the North Korean regime — and to throw in a few bitter words about Al Gore for employing them at Current TV. If that sounds bizarre coming from a self-styled hard-liner, it is simply another symptom of the mental imbalance induced in some people by the sight of Clinton (and Gore).

Finally there are the “serious” commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite “decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.” Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles — violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general.

But perhaps this latest outbreak should be considered mild, when compared with the devastating episodes of years past. Nobody is claiming that Clinton murdered or drugged anyone on his trip to Korea, that he profited by selling a real estate parcel there, or that he is a secret agent of the Dear Leader.

They’re saving all that for Barack Obama.

About The Author(s): Joe Conason is national correspondent for The New York Observer, where he writes a weekly column distributed by Creators Syndicate. He is also a columnist for Salon.com, and the Director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. His books Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, and The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Gene Lyons, were both national bestsellers; his latest book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, was released in February 2007. His writing and reporting have appeared in many publications, including Harpers, The Guardian, The Nation, and The New Republic. He also appears frequently on television and radio (notably as a regular Friday guest on Air America’s The Al Franken Show). He lives with his wife in New York City.

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…… and to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security.

But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off ? which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

If we don?t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years, this means that those who hold power are above the law and can abuse their power. …[MORE]

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References:

1. Bush’s Greatest Failure: The Call That Bush Didn’t Make — By David S. Broder
2. Mr. Bush at His Best and Worst — A WAPO Editorial
3. Obama on the Final Lap of His Journey to Presidency — By Eli Saslow, Michael Ruane and Howard Schneider — Washington Post Staff Writers. Saturday, January 17, 2009
4. Obama looks to Lincoln for inspiration — For Obama, Lincoln was model president: President-elect Barack Obama makes no secret of his admiration for the 16th president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is the inspiration for Obama’s inaugural theme, organizers say. Today’s whistlestop-like train trip follows that taken by Lincoln. And Obama will use the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration. [FULL STORY]

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Ronald Wilson Reagan assumed office at the age of 69, served two terms, and left office in 1988 at the age of 77. Shortly after he left office he was “diagnosed” with Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is the most common form of dementia a.k.a. senility. It is an incurable, degenerative, and terminal disease, generally diagnosed in people over 65 years of age.

The earliest observable symptoms are often mistakenly thought to be “age-related” concerns, or manifestations of stress. In the early stages, the most commonly recognized symptom is memory loss, such as difficulty in remembering recently learned facts. As the disease advances, symptoms include confusion, irritability and aggression, mood swings, language breakdown, long-term memory loss, and the general withdrawal of the sufferer as their senses decline. Gradually, bodily functions are lost, ultimately leading to death.

Did Ronald Reagan have this disease while he was President?

When Reagan disclosed in November 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, many people could not help suspecting that the illness had begun to rob him of memory while he was in the White House. Throughout his years in Washington, Mr. Reagan had been portrayed by many pundits and political opponents as absent-minded, inattentive, incurious, even lazy. And his Presidency was marked by a succession of very public mental stumbles — most notably his dismal performance in the first debate of the 1984 campaign, and his confused and forgetful accounting of his role in the Iran-contra affair — during which the Reagan dictatorship funded of CIA death squads to safeguard the corporate thievery by US multinational companies in Latin American countries. | Ronald Reagan Videos |

Were his doctors playing “Hide and Seek” for him? ……[ read more ]

Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk, a prominent neurologist and psychiatrist believes that Ronald Reagan was indeed starting to display early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease as the time of the presidential debates between candidates Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan in 1984.

A close look at McCain during this election cycle clearly reveals that there is definitely something wrong with his thought processes, very similar to Reagan’s, probably worse. He is having difficulty in expressing simple ideas and thoughts, sometimes stumbling in a dazed and confused stupor — He mis-pronounces, forgets and mix up facts and names, in some instances he fiddles with hands for extended periods of time before “gaffing” an answer.

McCain Dazed and Confused

McCain’s widely documented bouts of anger over the years could be attributed to PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) — after the beatings he suffered at the hands of the VietCong. Anger as we all know always affects decision making — in a negative manner. In McCain’s case — judgement about issues such as war, and the use of nuclear weapons, etc.

McCain’s tendency to blame everything on adversaries (read Obama), the “blatant lies” and innuendo is alarming. When asked why he has been hurling lies like a “Goat-Herder” in the middle of nowhere in Africa, McCain’s only answer has always been — “Its a tough campaign.”

Author Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D., on “Psychological Honesty,”… says: “Even a pathological liar carries deep in his heart a desire for goodness and honesty and yet, because of painful emotional wounds, believes that the world never has, and never will, recognize his pain. And so, to hide that pain from himself, he uses all the lies he can concoct to hurl at the world as he runs in fear from his own goodness.”

Joe Klein of Time Magazine says: “Almost every politician stretches the truth….but McCain’s lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent’s character and policies, featuring a consistent–and witting–disdain for the truth.” Klein adds: “Worse than the lies have been the smears. McCain ran a television ad claiming that Obama favored “comprehensive” sex education for kindergartners. (Obama favored a bill that would have warned kindergartners about sexual predators and improper touching.)” …[ Read More ]

Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, a Republican, asks: “Is John McCain Stupid?” [Read More]

Henninger talks with Kelsey Hubbard about McCain’s strategy

Paul Abrams, writing for the Huffington Post demands: “McCain, has a greater obligation, putting “country first,” to have an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) because he chose Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat, or degeneration or metastasis away from the Presidency,”…..to provide assurance that, for now at least, he has no brain metastases, due his frequent bouts with melanoma, which is a cancer that can spread widely in the body to almost any organ, including brain, lung, bone and liver.

McCain is Risky

Reagan the Serial Liar who made Americans feel good about themselves, was not only ill informed but probably partially senile most of his second term. His denial of knowledge of the details Contra Scandal may have been sincere — for the “semi-senile” president was being manipulated by the criminal war-profiteering cabal surrounding him.

Some have suggested that The Iran-contra affair was actually a gun-running, drug smuggling operation run out of Mena, Arkansas, under the direction of Vice President Bush (SNR), leader of the The Criminal “High Cabal.”

These things were happening under the nose of a “semi-senile” president Reagan.

It is the same Cabal that surrounds the current puppet president — George W. Bush, who is not senile but is equally decrepit, due to his inability to grasp complex issues — instead dangerously and recklessly hiding behind GOD, to camouflage poor reasoning, and an in-adequate intellectual capacity needed to conduct domestic and world affairs.

McCain is not as dumb as George Bush, but as senility sets in — and if he is elected president, with the present global economic and military turmoil, the rate of “aging” will quadruple — and he may even die in office. With Alzheimer’s and Melanoma eating into his “Cold-War” brain, “Maverick” McCain would turn out to be costlier to the United States than George Bush.

Bush’s eight years of ignorance and outright stupidity MUST not be replaced by four years “senility.”

A “half-brain dead” McCain is likely to become a puppet of the Neo-Con Cabal — which, right now, is very busy trying to sneak into a possible McCain administration hidden behind Sarah Palin’s skirt!

And, his choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate does not help things at all. At a time when America is facing very serious domestic and international constraints, the choice of Palin, who so far has distinguished herself only as a “Feisty” cheerleader borders on insanity — further evidence that McCain cannot think clearly and/or he is just another charlatan, practising “quackery” or something similar, to trick the American people — the SANE one’s at least — and not, the “Energized” “Conservative Base” — The most ignorant and racist quadrant of America, who have never hesitated in supporting and glorifying willful ignorance, in order to advance their agenda of intolerance.

References:

1. Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama….George F. Will, Syndicated ‘Conservative‘ Columnist. | READ MORE |

2. War Profiteering and the Concentration of Income and Wealth in America — Escalating Military Spending. By Prof. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh