Still miss the Clinton era? Vote for Knut the Bear! He could bring back the Clinton era more than any candidate currently running:Knut the polar bear is a ‘publicity-addicted psycho’, says keeper

Knut the polar bear has turned from a cuddly cub into a publicity-addicted psycho, one of his keepers claimed yesterday. Markus Roebke said Berlin Zoo’s celebrity animal was obsessed with the limelight and howled with rage when denied an audience.
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“He is addicted to the whole show, the human adulation. It is not healthy. He actually cries out or whimpers if he sees that there is not a spectator outside his enclosure ready to ooh and aah at him. When the zoo had to shut because of black ice everywhere he howled until staff members stood before him and calmed him down.”
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Now Knut is bigger, the crowds are larger — and, his keeper warns, his mental health is deteriorating.

Sound Familiar?

[Clinton] needs to be the center of attention. Because when he is, he feels like he has a center. That’s what the people on the rope line are there for: to fill him up. Left to himself — left with himself — he is bored, anxious; he needs a hit of adulation or he will float away. (Clinton’s aides dread drawing presidential vacation duty; Clinton can’t stand being away from the limelight.)…He cannot live a genuinely private life. Neither can she. So they must be in ours.

– Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton, 2000

Think Hillary in Bosnia was Fun? Check her out in Kosovo

[A]n amazing scene I witnessed one night in the autumn of 1999 while watching CNN. The Clintons were in Kosovo…sitting and chatting with a refugee child. Television cameras were burring away, but then a print cameraman leaned down with his Nikon. Bill Clinton noticed him — I saw it. And at that point he moved his head close to the first lady’s, so that their heads touched as they looked soulfully, together, at the poor children. It was — there is no other phrase for it — cringe-making.

There must be a strange paradox when you live a life so consumed by images. You want to be in the picture because it is real and will impress people, but the people you are impressing are by definition people who are impressed by a picture. They are not — how to put it? — insightful, bright, sophisticated. Which means you’re spending all your time trying to impress people you think, in your heart, are dumb.

– Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton

Bring in the Experts

[I met with] a woman who has known them for more than 20 years, a political professional who has been in the room and listened to Mrs. Clinton’s conversation and watched her strategize. She had been inclined to like Hillary — they share the same political views and the same passion for politics…I asked her to bring her point of view, but she surprised me by coming to our meeting with a book, a classic of the field of psychology called Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism by Otto Kernberg, M.D.

“One of the interesting things [Kernberg] says is that people with this kind of disorder have a great need to be loved and admired by others, which is a curious contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. On the surface, they have an overinflated view of themselves, but yet they can’t maintain that unless they get the adulation of an individual or, in her case and his case, a crowd — that is, the mirror that reflects back to them the grandiose view they have of themselves. So it’s a circle that has to keep going.”

She started to read from the book. “Another characteristic of these personalities is that…they have little enjoyment of life other than the tributes they recieve from others or from their own grandiose fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard….”

– Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton

Polar Bears — or the Clintons?

They seem to me trapped…looking for the admiration that they think will lead them home. Two summers ago I bumped into an intimate, lifelong friend of the Clintons, and what he told me has remained with me as I watch Mrs. Clinton mount her [senatorial] campaign. The friend was on a plane with the Clintons in 1997, as they returned from a vacation. On the way back to Washington they had to stop for a ceremonial appearance. The plane landed, the ramp of Air Force One was lowered, and suddenly the Clintons, who moments before had been slumped distractedly in their seats, came alive. Now they were smiling, laughing, waving to the crowd in the lights. Suddenly the Clintons were happy.

“They’re going to need a lot of therapy when this is over,” he said. “They’re gonna need help to get them off what they’re hooked on.”

What?” I asked. “The adulation,” he said.

– Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton

The Light, the Light…I…Need…the Light

Ex-President Bill Clinton may be seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to adjust to private life, a report out of Chicago suggests…[S]ince leaving the White House, Clinton is having a difficult time coping with life out of the spotlight.

– Carl Limbacher, Jr., Newsmax magazine, September 2002

Try Fish. Polar Bears Love Fish.

All of this would be touching if their hunger, their human if outsized hunger, could be met in some private way. But it has to be met, each day, and fed by our country. Which makes their private plight our public problem.

– Peggy Noonan, The Case Against Hillary Clinton

And Send Bill with Him

“Knut must go and the sooner the better,” he [keeper Roebke] said, insisting that the bear should be sent to an animal park where he received less attention.

– UK Daily Mail, March 27, 2008

Knut…or Bill?

Mr Roebke is not the only observer to question Knut’s sanity. In January, a prominent animal conservationist branded him “an animal psychopath”.

The President’s Private Mental Condition is None of our Business!

[Clinton] is far more psychologically disturbed than the public ever imagined.

– Michael Isikoff, Dateline NBC, April 1999

Can Gov. Spitzer Recommend Someone?

I think that’s an understatement. The suggestion is that this guy is in terrible trouble mentally and psychologically and is a completely hollow narcissist and egomaniac. And he thinks that the best therapy for it is being President. My view is that presidential therapy hasn’t worked for him and shouldn’t have been tried. But he certainly does need professional help.

– Christopher Hitchens, WOR Radio, April 1999

Note: Just as the public didn’t know that JFK suffered from debilitating back pain the whole time he was president, so we didn’t know that Bill Clinton was insane the whole time he was president.

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