It has become tougher to criticize Bill Clinton. George W. Bush's bad performance in office has drained the pool of past president's negatives. But all the talk about Clinton's portrait being hung in the National Portrait Gallery gives an opportunity to revisit Clinton's performance in metaphor.
Bill's portrait is eight feet high. It is appropriate for an exhibitionist, ask Paula Jones , to have that large a painting. There has been speculation about the pose he has assumed. Specifically , the open coat with the spread fingers resting on his hip. People have remarked that there wasn't any wedding ring. Was he dating again? Maybe the spread two-fingers represent the "Peace Sign". If that's his message then that is not appropriate. He was the guy who started a preemptive war with NATO in the Balkans in 1996. He was probably trying to get his name off the front page in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So he started a war with a country that didn't threaten America. Amazingly, Americans didn't object. But certain war-mongering opportunists in the military-industrial complex noticed U.S. voter apathy. So within a year The Project for the New American Century was launched. Founding members included, Cheney ( Dick lobbied Bill from Halliburton about bases in the Balkans), Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrahams and other Neocons. The rest is history. Preemptive wars and the reconstruction that follow are a perpetual money-making enterprise as long as you can get people to die for it in the armed services.
Bill's face show a kind of tired decadence. This is appropriate . His relentless and greedy climb in politics has cost him personally and has cost him the friendships that he has exploited in those pursuits. Like Oscar Wilde's " The Picture of Dorian Gray", dark deals for power and longevity have the cost of altering one's view and how one is viewed.
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