Hillary is dead. Sir Edmund Hillary, that is, who conquered Mt Everest in 1953 with sherpa Tenzing Norgay. He’ll be remembered, for inspiring awe and derring-do, and being honest enough to admit: “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.”
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary
(b) 20 July 1919, (d) 11 January 2008.
RIP.
This item, from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, is one of the funnier contributions I’ve read:
How Clemenceau Crippled Clinton
A Los Angeles Times editorial ponders the difficulties of the onetime Democratic front-runner and blames them on … President Bush! Seriously:
For Clinton, the trouble is not emotion but, perversely, President Bush. So badly has this president performed that he has discredited not just his own administration but the very idea of Washington knowledge. Voters frustrated by the war in Iraq and anxious about the economy have turned on the man who brought us those troubles and on experience itself — and thus on Clinton.
But this is much too simplistic. After all, it’s not as if George W. Bush just sprang forth out of nothing. And if you look at history, it’s clear that the real culprit — perversely! — is Georges Clemenceau.
Clemenceau was the French prime minister in 1919 who at the Versailles conference pushed for the imposition of harsh peace terms on Germany, the loser in World War I. The hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty contributed to Hitler’s rise to power, leading to World War II.
World War II made a hero of Dwight Eisenhower (no wonder Mrs. Clinton can’t stand him), thereby making possible his election as president in 1952. This made it possible, 16 years later, for Ike’s vice president, Richard Nixon, to ascend to the White House.
If Nixon hadn’t been president, he would not have resigned, and Gerald Ford would not have entered the White House in 1974, which means he would not have been an ex-president in 1980, when Ronald Reagan invited Ford to be his running mate. Surely under such circumstances Ford would have accepted the offer rather than hold out for some ridiculous “co-presidency.”
If Ford had become vice president in 1980, George H.W. Bush would not have. It’s hard to see how George W. Bush could have ascended to the White House on the strength of daddy’s legacy if daddy were a mere former U.N. ambassador.
So you see, Clemenceau, with a little help from Hitler and every Republican president since World War II, caused George W. Bush to become president, thereby discrediting the very idea of experience. And to think, when Mrs. Clinton spoke of the vast right-wing conspiracy, people scoffed.
It’s also an excellent excuse to highlight the paper’s new online design, and the fact that the editorial page on free markets and free people is now, well, free. After all that ribbing about the New York Times’s failed TimesSelect subscription experiment, it’s about time the Wall Street Journal capitulated too.
Or, to offer an alternative headline, suggested by a journalist mate of mine: “Manufactured news, only on ‘e’!”
The junk-stat-of-the-week comes from a news report last night on e-tv, the only private free-to-air TV station in South Africa. It begins ominously: “Abortion clinics are being flooded with requests to have pregnancies terminated.”
Look, I know teen sex sells. That’s one reason for the provocative headline on this post. But let’s follow this news story a little more closely. According to the report, Marie Stopes Clinics carried out 24 223 abortions last year. “Many were done on teenagers, some even younger,” says the newsreader, dramatically.
Cut to footage of schoolgirls, with the camera focusing on somewhat podgy waists that may indicate pregnancy, and faces chastely omitted. “Still at school, still teenagers, and pregnant,” says the voice-over. “It’s girls like these who are queueing at clinics around the country for abortions.”
