Tuesday: Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

Q:  Why is Christopher Hitchens, that “drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay”, still getting paid to write for Slate?

His latest piece is called, Serving the Clintonian Interest, is full of the typical anti-Clinton shtick.

China, Indonesia, Georgia—these are not exactly negligible countries on our defense and financial and ideological peripheries. In each country, there are important special interests that equate the name Clinton with the word pushover. And did I forget to add what President Clinton pleaded when the revulsion at the Rich pardons became too acute? He claimed that he had concerted the deal with the government of Israel in the intervals of the Camp David “agreement”! So anyone who criticized the pardons had better have been careful if they didn’t want to hear from the Anti-Defamation League. Another splendid way of showing that all is aboveboard and of convincing the Muslim world of our evenhandedness.

In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me.

Damn, that President Clinton!  Showing everyone up by trying to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.  Why wasn’t he appropriately attentive to Mark Rich’s unsavory pardon details when he had to have known that the entire media would be covering it?  That whole Camp David excursion was just a conveeeenient distraction.

I can almost imagine a Monty Pythonesque voice in the background saying, “Well, there’s spam, spam, *bacon* and spam.  It doesn’t have too much spam in it.”  It’s the same damn spammy stuff we’ve eaten for 15 years now.  Give it a rest, Christopher.  There’s no THERE there.  I’m beginning to think that Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS) has run its course.  The merest mention of an investigation of the two of them fails to raise our heartbeats anymore.  It isn’t going to sell any additional papers.  It won’t get anymore hits to the WaPo online site.  We are all yaaaaawwwwwnnninng.

Maybe this was all part of the Clintons’ diabolical plan.  Let them be overexposed.  Allow some vaguely unsavory connexions to stand for awhile.  Drive the media into a frenzy while Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd exercise their IBM Selectrics for awhile and lead them all into a false sense of security.  It’ll be just like the salad days of the 90’s when there was a scandal waiting under each table in the White House.  Except now, fifteen years later, after investigation after investigation has turned up nothing but a zaftig beret wearing intern, nobody cares what the Clintons are doing.  Now, they really *can* get away with murder.  It’s wicked.

Well, who can blame the Hitchens, Dowd and Rich types?  They’re about to be has-beens, washed up.  They won’t be able to criticize The Precious without having the word “racist” flung at them.  They’re caught between a couple who most Americans admire and a President Elect whose political office will defenestrate from the press plane the first reporter whose prose is not absolutely laudatory and fawning.  That should make for some interesting reading in the next four years.  I am looking forward to a lot of “damning with faint praise” pieces.  Reading between the lines will be very entertaining.

Meanwhile, the new Foreign President, Madame Secretary Clinton, will be lavished with the kind of foreign press that she and her husband always used to get.  Christopher Hitchens should stock up on the Bombay Sapphire.