Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton

Christopher Hitchens’ opinions on Bill Clinton were rough from the outset, even before the scandal that plagued Clinton’s presidency. Even though the famed author wrote an entire (albeit brief) book documenting the moral shortcomings of the former president, we nonetheless felt it fit to provide our own greatest hits of Hitchens on Bill Clinton. Perhaps our favorite quote from Hitchens on Clinton was one made in passing “we should be very suspicious of people who can’t be offended by anything and can be friends with anyone. It means they don’t really care about anything.”

The first four quotes occur before the famous scandal, just to give readers a sense of context.

If you want to put Clinton’s principles to the test, make sure to be the last person to have spoken to him. The man is like a big, fat cushion. He bears the impression of whoever last sat upon him.

Every Time Clinton betrays a friend, or abandons a cause, or rats on a principle, it’s him we are supposed to feel sorry for.

Like a fleshy man caught in a fight outside a sordid bar, he sometimes bellows for aides to hold his coat and let him at them but often looks grateful for the arms that restraining him from the fray.

He (Bill Clinton) seems to have a flaunting need for abasement, and an awful lust to earn the approval of those who sneer at him, even at his wife and his daughter.”

Hitchens on Clinton During and After The Scandal

In an article titled “Weapons of Mass Distraction”, Hitchens did not hold back after Clinton’s dubious orders to begin a bombing campaign in the middle east to divert attention from his impeachment probe. For those that do not remember, Bill Clinton was president once. During that presidency, he comitted an affair with one of his aides named Monica Lewinsky. In a transparent attempt to delay and divert attention away from the impeachment proceedings, on December 19, 1998, Bill Clinton launched an air strike on Iraq. Hitchens had only the following to say:

It is made clear by Clinton’s own conduct and arguments that for him foreign policy and domestic policy do not exist in parallel universe but are one and the same.

It’s one thing to say, with reasonable confidence, that the Oval Office is currently occupied by a war criminal, a rapist, and a pathological liar. It’s another to ponder the full implications. If half of what one knows about Clinton’s business deals and date-rapes is half-true, then he has been going through political life for years, aware or quasi-aware that any or every telephone call might  be one he is dreading. That’s more stress than most of us could take: only a certain kind of personality could be expected to endure it. You can find this under the simpering liberal media description of ‘Comeback Kid,’ or you can check it in a taxonomy of an entirely different kind, where the key phrase ‘Threat to self and others.