[guest post by JVW]

Is there anyone on Earth who has seen their star fall more drastically in the past three years than Bill Clinton? After bestriding the world like a colossus, becoming fabulously wealthy and redeeming himself in the eyes of the left by not being George W. Bush, Bubba’s reputation has been tarnished as his party has largely deserted him on the issues. Where once he was seen as an altruistic elder statesman valiantly attempting to address global issues of poverty and want, the Bernie Sanders left now carps at him for amassing such a huge fortune giving speeches and trading favors. His legacy of using federal resources to aid in fighting crime on a local level has been tarnished by claims that he supported the mass incarceration of minority males. His promotion of women in his cabinet and fealty to abortion is forgotten in the #metoo moment as we recall his disgraceful personal behavior with women. And his governing style of whatever 55% of the voters believe in is exactly what he believes in has been swamped by the Barack Obama governing belief that leftism is on the right side of history and should forever remain on the march. The confluence of all these trends has now driven his popularity rating below 50% for the first time in his post-Presidency since he was suffering through the revelation of his controversial last-minute pardons over seventeen years ago.

So it’s up to the white gentry liberals at the New York Times to provide Bubba with an outlet to rehabilitate his shredded reputation. Not brave enough to try to defend him in the opinion (or even news) section and risk the wrath of the social justice left who now runs the party, they instead gave him some safer space in the books section where he can bloviate on writers and tomes that he allegedly enjoys. If there are two things we all know about William Jefferson Clinton, they are that he habitually lies about matters large and small, and that he jealously guards his reputation as a towering intellect, lest the city slickers whose approval he so craves come to view him as just a barefooted rube from the Ozarks. The format is a Q&A, where the forty-second President treats us to his usual bunkum and hokum to come up with answers that are guaranteed to appeal to the tastes of the pseudo-intellects who read that pretentious rag. Witness the grandiosity:

Q: What books are on your nightstand?
Clinton: The Future Is History by Masha Gessen. It’s great and written in a direct, blunt style appropriate for the subject. I’ll soon be finished. The Future of Humanity by Michio Kaku; Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker; and Capture: A Theory of the Mind by David Kessler. Next up is the latest book in Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow trilogy.

A wag in the comments section opined that Clinton must have an industrial-strength nightstand to hold so many books. Note how Bubba ticks off two tomes with “Future” in the title, desperate for us to know that he’s still a guy who can’t stop thinking about tomorrow.

Q: What was the last truly great book you read?
Clinton: I loved Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright, and Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert.

The first book is about the Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma during the 1920s, so it’s perfect for the modern white-folks-have-long-terrorized-minority-communities obsession of the modern left. The Albright book is, of course, a warning about Trump and anyone else not convinced that the credentialed elite make the smartest decisions in policy. The Beckert book apparently explains how the rise of cotton created our modern capitalist system and today’s economic inequality.

Q: What was the best book you read as a student?
Clinton: In college: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. In law school: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. (This was also the best over all.) At Oxford: The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas and To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.

Hey, we get that Clinton was morally obligated to include the work of a Latino on his list, but did he have to choose one who was a fan of Castro and Chavez? Imagine how progressive heads would have exploded if he had chosen a book from Mario Vargas Llosa instead. Note that all four authors chosen here were committed men of the left, so Bubba wants to remind us that he was a liberal’s liberal during his student years.

Q: Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
Clinton: I’m embarrassed to admit it but in two tries I have never been able to get all the way through Don Quixote. I like long books, raced through War and Peace at 22, but could not finish Quixote. I will try at least once more.

Don Quixote is the finest novel ever written (this may be slight hyperbole on my part), so Clinton ought to hang his head in shame. But I suppose I can see how a novel about a lone man fighting to retain heroic notions of chivalry, duty, honor, and chastity would horrify someone as morally sleazy as The Big Creep.

Q: What books made you want to become a writer? And what books made you want to become a politician?
Clinton: [. . . ] North Toward Home by Willie Morris, The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

If you are keeping score at home, in these answers Clinton has mentioned eighteen books, and included one each by an Asian-American man, an African-American woman, an African-American man, a Hispanic man, a Lesbian, and four Southern white males. Elsewhere he mentions reading Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, in case you were thinking that he was a bit light on black writers. Why, it’s almost as if he were trying to stitch together an electoral coalition! He must figure that Hillary will still be good to drag along the white woman vote.

Anyway, there are more softball questions followed by more fatuous answers, so feel free to read the whole thing if you are a glutton for boredom. Bubba is always going to have a fanbase among a certain set of aging gentry liberals who like the fact that he doesn’t make you feel guilty about being wealthy as long as you are in favor of a 39.6% upper bracket and hold the Hollywood-approved social views, but that group will get smaller and smaller as the years go by.

– JVW