The "Big Dog" Howls Again

Here is Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece on Bill Clinton that's eliciting such a howl of outrage from the ex-President's people.

Bill Clinton -- hanging with the wrong people, enjoying the company of pretty women, livin' large . . .

who'da thought?! Anyone who's surprised by the contents of the piece must have been living under a rock throughout the '90's. What's not clear to me is why Clinton's people are making the kind of fuss that guarantees the story even wider distribution.

It's funny. It's not even the predictable suggestions of wild times for Bill Clinton that most quickly restores what Jane Austen might have described as all the "enjoyment" of my longstanding distate for Clinton. It's the stuff like this:

As president, Clinton often could not show grace in the smallest ways. He dithered about where and when to go on vacation, so that aides and Secret Service agents could not plan their own. He declined to release aides and reporters who had waited around all through a pointless Saturday of duty while he made up his mind whether to play golf (a game at which he has been known to cheat). He was never, ever, on time.

The way someone treats his subordinates is incredibly revealing. And what it reveals about Bill Clinton isn't good. Hillary Clinton's loss of the Democratic nomination -- after being the prohibitive favorite -- is attributable in large part to an entitlement mentality that bled, all too easily, into a firm conviction that no contingency plans for a post-Super Tuesday campaign were necessary. Well, when it comes to entitlement, it seems that she learned at the knee of the master.