ONCE upon a time, I went to a shotgun wedding held in a double-wide trailer down South. The invitation read, “RSVP. BYOB. And please bring a dish to pass.”
In other words, the guests catered the nuptial affair. This innovation in the hospitality arts reminds me of the Clampetts of Chappaqua, who can be expected to pull something like this when the day comes for Chelsea to jump the broom.
On second thought, that’s not fair to Jed and all his kin. The Beverly Hillbillies may have had the manners of rubes, but they were not wicked, just simple.
They had dignity. They came by their good fortune honestly. Only their clothes were shabby.
The Clintons aren’t Clampetts; they aren’t even the spiritual progeny of Boss Hogg, whose cornpone coarseness would have prevented the editors of Talk magazine from taking him to their breast.
It’s hard to find the precise pop-culture analogue to the Clintons, who have broken the mold when it comes to dirtbag behavior from people of their stature.
Cracker Corleones? Not quite: Even mobsters have a sense of personal honor.
Think “Bobo” – author David Brooks’ shorthand word for “bourgeois bohemians,” a term he tags to the new American elite in the Era of Clinton. They package ’60s sexual ethics and sensibilities with ’80s greed and cynicism in one self-satisfied bundle.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, dear readers, are Bobo Ceaucescus.
Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife, Elena, the peasant dictators of communist Romania, were hopelessly vulgar and thoroughly corrupt – facts their own megalomania concealed from them.
When the Ceaucescus paid a state visit to the Queen of England, they made off with the gold fixtures from their Buckingham Palace bathroom. Bill and Hill would have understood.
How miserable Madame Clinton must be today, hiding out in her Westchester manse, canceling all her appointments and afraid to face the press and the public.
She really must not have anticipated that her husband’s pardons of scummy Marc Rich, the fugitive financier, and those felonious Hasidim – to say nothing of the disgraceful send-off they gave themselves – would have been met with outrage and contempt from their reliable amen corner in the liberal media.
It comes with the psychological territory. Even as they were on trial for their lives, Nicolae and Elena had no comprehension of what they had done wrong. They were that full of themselves.
Now that the Clintons can no longer keep their subjects in line by claiming to be the only thing keeping the country safe from mythical right-wing hordes (a Ceaucescu tactic, by the way), their spell is broken.
That fetid Clintonian aroma that has gagged many of us for eight years has finally reached the nostrils of the mainstream press. It won’t just be the conservative press eating Madame Senator’s lunch now. RSVP, BYOB, and please bring a dish to pass!
If the Bobo Ceaucescus are ever driven out of Chappaqua, they can always find sanctuary in the town of New Square, home of the only Hillary-loving Hasidim on God’s green earth.
It takes a village like this to succor the Clintons. It’s full of people who believe the rules the rest of us live by don’t apply to them, and that anybody who objects to their behavior is a raving bigot.
“It’s like Hitler,” one hysterical Hasid told a reporter. “It’s hate all over the country against Jews.”
Well, golly. Now that honest liberals are at long last forced to admit that yes, the Clintons are a revolting pair, it must be a comfort to the former First Couple to know that there’s one place left in America that still believes in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
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