William J. Clinton, Will You Please Go Now!? at politburo diktat 2.0

William J. Clinton, Will You Please Go Now!?

I’ve just spent my lunch break reading the New York Magazine piece titled “Bill Clinton’s Post-Presidency: A Plan for World Domination.” Some times, you just want to take a person and shake some sense into his head. (In fact, at one point, writer Jennifer Senior says: “This is the Clinton you just want to shake.”)

Perhaps the biggest groaner of the entire article (it’s a long one) is this:

“I always thought,” he says, “that bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did.”

While the rest of the stuff just makes me want to shake my head and grumble, that line really, really gets my goat (see here for why).

But let’s take a walk through the article. The Bush clan is always hammered for its ties to Arab regimes. Here, we learn that Clinton, without Air Force One, still manages to get by:

For this particular trip, Issam M. Fares, the business magnate and deputy prime minister of Lebanon, lent us his private jet, a fabulous flying wonderland of retro suede recliners, wood paneling, and mirrors—one half expects Austin Powers to pop out of the loo

Issam seems a fairly unobjectionable guy, but if I were a conspiracy nut…

Anyway, moving on.

In Kigali, Rwanda, I watch Clinton spend three minutes trying to coax a smile out of a long-faced child with AIDS; he simply will not leave until he’s managed to do so.

Come on, Bill. Haven’t these Rwandans suffered enough because of you?

While the writer did at times seem a bit taken with Clinton and seemed to see Sandy Socks Berger as a reliable source, I only found myself groaning aloud at one point. What point, you ask? This point:

Much more than his successor, Clinton understood exactly which direction the world was headed when he twice took the oath of office …

Uhhhh. Okay. But how’s this for a laugher?

“I think there are three people who are universal, whose prestige truly extends way over borders,” says Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital (and a key participant in the CGI). “There’s Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Clinton….”

Kofi Annan, huh? Yeah, that’s company I’d want to keep. (de Soto also informs us that Clinton doesn’t even speak a foreign language. Well, he must be dummer than W!)

Then there’s a great deal of stuff about Clinton trying to save Africa. Seems he could have tried a little harder while he was president. Of course, he’d like to blame everything on the Lewinski scandal serving as a distraction, but the timeline doesn’t quite work out that way. No matter, the rest of the world, including Africa, understood.

“Africans saw it for exactly what it was: an abuse of power,” Clinton tells me. “They got it here. And all across the world.”

Well, there’s also such a thing as abuse of power by not doing anything. The writer mentions this:

The irony is that Clinton, when he was president, had a much less engaged relationship with this place than he did with other parts of the world. In fact, one could easily make the case that Africa was worse off in 2000 than it was in 1992. There was the genocide in Rwanda, where the president turned a blind eye and 800,000 people died in 100 days. There was a devastating war in the Congo, in which the president pursued a similar policy of non-intervention. And from 1992 to 2000, AIDS cases more than doubled in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet in 1998, he barely mentioned AIDS on his first trip to the continent.

Indeed. The irony. That’s a rather weak word, but I guess it’ll do. Some people haven’t forgotten.

Kigali is the one place in Africa where I do not see Clinton getting a hero’s welcome. At the moment, we’re on our way to the genocide memorial. As he waves to people standing by the road, almost none wave back.

But at least he feels bad about the whole thing. And he’s apologized.

Clinton has often said that his failure to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide was one of the greatest regrets of his presidency. Yet as Samantha Power meticulously chronicles in A Problem From Hell, it’s not like he felt any urgency to stop the butchery as it was occurring. During those three-plus months, he never once convened his top advisers to discuss the genocide. On April 8, the State Department held a press conference and mentioned the slaughter in Rwanda, but gave far greater emphasis to its concern over foreign-government bans of Schindler’s List.

The article is well worth reading–and not just to make fun of the man. You also get a sense of his frustration with the Democratic party. It’s clear that while Clinton might need a good shake, he’d like to give the party leaders a good shaking as well.