Imagine

The other day, I mentioned the 80th birthday bash for Shimon Peres, the Neville Chamberlain of Israel. Bill Clinton was there. So was Bret Stephens, editor and chief of the Jerusalem Post, and a favorite here at Power Line. Stephens provides this priceless account of Clinton’s performance:
“Already he had brought the crowd to its feet at the Mann auditorium in Tel Aviv, singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” with a group of Arab and Israeli schoolchildren (“Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do . . .”). Now he had something personal to say. He had been in Srebrenica the day before, he said. There he had met a woman who was burying her husband and six children. He told us to be mindful that ours was not the only country visited by horror. He told us that Mr. Peres was a man who knew that vengeance belonged to God, not man. He said all this in a hoarse and mournful and significant tone of voice. I wanted to puke.”
Stephens took particular exception to Clinton’s invocation of Srebrenica. Although candidate Clinton promised not to ignore the genocide in the Balkans, Clinton the president looked the other way. Stephens, who as a young man voted for Clinton in 1992 largely because of his promised policy regarding the Balkans, now concludes:
“There never was a ‘President Clinton.’ There were, instead, two incarnations of Candidate Clinton: first the challenger, then the incumbent. In both cases, no such thing as ‘policy’ could be said to exist; Mr. Clinton moved where political convenience dictated. Among other consequences (not all of which were bad), one is the mass graveyard of Srebrenica, which Mr. Clinton, with truly mind-boggling shamelessness, now employs for rhetorical effects.”
Well put. But I already wanted to puke after reading the part about Clinton singing “Imagine.”