THIS is a must-read — PJ O’Rourke’s review of Living History is good enough to make you forget that the Weekly Standard already had Matt Labash write a savage review of this book:
There’s “the trip to Russia when Hillary and Mrs. Boris Yeltsin ‘laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries.’ I hesitate to think there was a logical explanation, but Hillary does say, ‘Ireland invigorated and inspired me, and I wished we could bottle up the good feelings and take them back home.’ It’s been done before.”
“We must recognize Hillary’s principled outspoken feminism as elucidated in her U.N. Conference on Women speech: ‘It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.’ . . . And understand her stupidity. Now, Hillary’s stupidity is of a Monday’s-homework-done-on-Friday-night, 1,400 on her SATs kind, but nonetheless stupid for all that. She has lunch with Jackie Onassis, who ‘cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people. She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might be a target.’ Was Jackie talking about the grassy knoll or about a different kind of mons?
Hillary serves roasted eggplant soup and sweet potato puree to Jacques Chirac and doesn’t get the joke when Chirac says, ‘Of course, I love many things American, including the food. You know, I used to work in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.’ After listening to Jiang Zemin explain that the Tibetans had been liberated by the Chinese, Hillary concludes, ‘I don’t think Jiang . . . was being quite straight with me on Tibet.'”
O’Rourke’s vicious conclusion:
“[I]t says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures–who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such–now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he’d wake up literate.”
(Link via The American Scene).