If they weren't such an atrociously decadent couple, it would be hard not to feel sympathy for the Clintons as they watch helplessly as their reputations and their political hopes and dreams come crashing down, to shatter into tiny bits and pieces on the rock-hard surface of reality.
As the Obama steamroller rolls over them time and again, Bill and Hillary Clinton must surely recall Abraham Lincoln's admonition that while "you can fool some of the people all the time, you can't fool all of the people all the time."
They had a great ride while it lasted, mainly because they could always count on the big media machine to help them fool all of the people most of the time and protect them from any facts or incidents that might sully their reputations or cast doubt on their multitudinously spurious words and deeds.
When Hillary did what everybody expected her to do and announced her decision to reclaim what the Clintons considered their rightful status as sole and rightful occupants of the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, big media pronounced it simply inevitable that Mrs. Clinton would be the Democratic nominee and the next president.
Nobody, not the Clintons nor her media henchpersons (I almost wrote "henchmen"), expected the arrival on the scene of a rival capable of seriously challenging Hillary in the race for the nomination. Nor did anybody even suspect that the long and torrid love affair between the Clinton's and the media was about to come to a sudden and potentially lethal end.
What brings this to mind is the exposure of Mrs. Clinton's blatant falsehood concerning her trip to Bosnia in March 1996 when she alleged that she had heroically braved sniper fire when she arrived at the Tuzla air base and was forced to duck and scurry for cover as the slugs whizzed overhead.
Witnesses such as Sinbad, an entertainer who was with her, and a Washington Post reporter who was there, insisted her claim was a lot of malarkey. She stuck to her story until CBS released a video of the scene showing a placid scene where she was greeted by a little girl who gave her a bouquet. Her claim of sniper fire turned out to be the shots not heard round the world, or even at the Tuzla airport.
The point to be emphasized here is that the media has found a new, and in their eyes an exciting new hero, and, like NBC's Chris Matthews who shivers in near-ecstatic delight at the very sight of him, they've lost their minds and hearts to Barack Obama.
Before Obama came down from the mount carrying the stone tablets inscribed with the one commandment that thou shalt bring about change, anything as damaging to Mrs. Clinton's cause as her outright lies about Bosnia, she says she "misspoke," a demagogue's way of reluctantly admitting a blatant falsehood, would have been swept under a rug.
One doubts, for example, that CBS would have ever found that damaging footage in their archives when she was their beloved heroine, but now she's fair game and the years and years of the media covering up for the Clintons has all but come come to an end.
It was, however, inevitable. The Clintons carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction — a perverse gene that lurks in their DNA awaiting the right moment to suddenly emerge and destroy them.
R. Emmett Tyrell, the pixyish and brilliantly loquacious editor of the sprightly American Spectator magazine and the author of the recent book "The Clinton Crackup" saw it all coming. It's all foretold in Chapter 8 in his book, he told me recently.
"In Chapter 8 I warned that Hillary would face a revolt amongst the younger generation and Obama come along and presented their candidate [to them]. I didn't say it was Obama, but I said it would happen — that the elites were wary of her and didn't want to see a renewal of the 1990s.
"Obama began to move and cut into her double digit national lead in November, when he started saying we don't want to go through the 1990s arguments all over again and expressed dis-relish with the baby boomers. "
Tyrell reminded me of the "corruption of the baby boomers" and how "the next generation of Democrats had had enough of them." In that chapter, Tyrell accurately foretold the havoc Bill Clinton would wreak on his wife's campaign, recalling that "the political genius, the rock star Bill Clinton, is a disaster when he campaigns for other candidates.
"In 2004 he campaigned for 14 candidates, 12 of them lost. In this campaign he has been a disaster for her. He takes the limelight from her, he talks solely about himself, and he's forever committing faux pas as he did in South Carolina which really doomed her."
I asked Tyrell if it wouldn't be better to have Hillary win the nomination because she would be easy to beat in the general election. Tyrell said a resounding "No. The sooner we get these crooks off the national scene the better off our country is, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party."
Speaking of the media, Tyrell told me it is "so biased that they'll allow all sorts of anomalies to take place, the most prominent anomaly being that a presidential candidate in 1992, who had obviously lied about marijuana use, who had obviously lied about his energetic dodging of the draft during the Cold War, and had also been caught on tape coaching a mistress to lie to the press, would still get a pass from the American media and still be reported as a political genius."
Speaking of what he called "that act of episodic apologetics that went on with the American media from 1992," and noting that "Mrs. Clinton is now bragging about her experience when the truth is her 'experience' is that of the most corrupt political couple in the history of American politics," Tyrell prophesized that "rather soon, serious writers in increasing numbers are going to start telling the truth about the Clintons."
Once again, he was right on target.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist and World War II Marine who writes for Newsmax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist (Cato) for National Review magazine in the 1960s.
He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.
He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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