It still takes a village idiot

I don’t believe that any of us here at Power Line commented on Hillary Clinton’s book, Living History, when it came out a few months ago. This wasn’t due to any right-wing conspiracy, or even conscious parallelism. It was just that none of us thought the book warranted much comment.
What it warranted, actually, is a review by P.J. O’Rourke. His review of Ms. Clinton’s first book, which he called “It takes a village idiot,” is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. I read it out loud to my family, and we couldn’t stop laughing. Here is O’Rourke’s review of Hillary’s latest effort. I think it rivals his earlier masterpiece.
O’Rourke has a unique take on Hillary — he regards her as stupid, the “village idiot.” Part of O’Rourke’s humor stems from his exploration of the sense in which this iconoclastic assessment may be correct. The rest comes from the fact that O’Rouke is a comic genius.
Here are a few of my favorite lines:
“Hillary Clinton’s new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie.”
“Boring others is a form of aggression, and Hillary attacks her public with the weapon of brutal dullness. . .Until page 440 of her memoir, nothing happens. You know the nothing I mean. Any number of Clinton friends and supporters told us it was nothing. And, as a result of nothing happening, nothing — as you may remember — happened.”
“Conservatives, including most of the Founding Fathers, have always worried that the price of a democratic system would be a mediocre nation. But George Washington and William F. Buckley Jr. put together could not have foreseen, in their gloomiest moments, the rise of Clinton-style uber-mediocrity — with its soaring commonplaces, its pumped trifling, its platinum-grade triviality. The Alpha-dork husband, the super-twerp wife, and the hyper-wonk vice president –together with all the mega-weenie water carriers, such vicious pit gerbil George Stephanopoulos and Eastern diamondback rattleworm Sidney Blumenthal — spent eight years trying to make America nothing to brag about. They failed. And that is, ultimately, what makes Living Historysuch a good nonread.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses