Is there anything interesting in "My Life" by Bill Clinton? Oh, yes. Page 870... The foothills of the vast tome are deceptively easy, when Mr. Clinton is merely telling a heartwarming personal anecdote about every single person listed in the Arkansas telephone directory between 1946 and 1992. But in the higher elevations after page 700, it’s heavier going: Up in the clouds, way above the out-of-his-tree line, the president advances the theory that he was obliged to submit to random sexual advances in order to uphold the important constitutional principle that Republicans are uptight about oral sex. I think I’ve got that right, but by then I was finding it hard to breathe and beginning to see double...

The clue to where he goes wrong comes in the prologue. "No person I know ever had more or better friends," he writes, "the now legendary FOBs[Friends of Bill]." Granted that a remarkable number of those FOBs wound up dead, in jail or drowning in legal bills, there are still thousands out there, and Bill feels he has to mention them all... Monica? The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: "During the government shutdown in late 1995," he writes, "I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions." Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written.
OUCH! Now, that’s painful.
Now, I understand that there are those who think Monica, Paula, Gennifer, et al., are peripheral distractions from the Clinton story--that it was one of the most consequential presidencies of the past several millennia and resulted in a lot of landmark legislation such as, um, that federal regulation restricting the size of your toilet cistern. Important stuff you wouldn’t get from the likes of James Buchanan or Chester Arthur. Mr. Clinton is certainly thinking of his legacy. The index lists more pages for "bin Laden, Osama" than "Jones, Paula," which isn’t how it seemed at the time. You can’t blame the poor fellow. As things stand, you’d be hard put to devise a more apt personal embodiment of the long holiday from history the U.S. took between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. If geopolitics is the Super Bowl, Mr. Clinton is Janet Jackson, complete with wardrobe malfunctions.
You go, Mark! Pile it on. :-p
Instead, Mr. Clinton’s book is a double flop: Either stake your claim to join the guys on Mount Rushmore or embrace your destiny as a guy who rushes to mount more.
Jeebus Cripes on a Crutch! Mark’s on a roll here.
In the old days, Bill Clinton carried off his peculiar psychoses with dash and élan. They were stirring times: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country can do for me." (I quote from memory.)