Reading The Fulcrum today, Charles' comment about watching Clinton on TV at the dedication of his library:

All my wife and I could say last night... was, man... I really miss him." The comparisons with Bush are immediate and unavoidable; here is a man who has a genuine warmth and a broad and deep intelligence. This was a man worthy of the office.

It made me laugh, if a bit ruefully, and I remembered the concluding paragraph from an article I wrote that was posted on Crapshoot in May of 2001. The article was titled Arsenic and Old Lays and played on the relation between Orwellian and Warholian, superficiality and celebrity.

As the sun slowly sinks below the western horizon, and the

focus on Billy's Willy is gradually supplanted

by attention paid to Bush's Blunders,

an image keeps running through my mind:

Bill Clinton is watching an episode of I Claudius,

the same scene, over and over.

The episode is the one where Tiberius, widely and publicly

castigated as a sexual degenerate, is sick and about to die.

Caligula, impatient for the throne, has just poisoned the dying man.

He looks up from his bed at Caligula and says,

"With you as emperor, they'll make me a god within a year."

And Tiberius laughs.

And Bill Clinton laughs.

The rest of us may find it a little more difficult to laugh.