Some sentences perfectly capture

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Some sentences perfectly capture why their creators are masters of their craft. Here’s an example …

Bill Clinton has had exactly one good day since he became a full-time New Yorker, and even that one good day required a fiasco to set it up.

Peerless.

That’s the first line of Rick Hertzberg’s quick take on the pardon story in the new issue of the New Yorker – a few parts of which are now actually on line. This isn’t an exculpating run-down of the affair. But it’s human and realistic and mordant and punishing – more or less in the right amounts.

I nominate it as one of the best three pieces written yet on the topic – along with this piece by Jacob Weisberg and this one by Jonathan Rauch (which I want to discuss more in a future post).

Weisberg’s piece is the best on motive and foible. Rauch’s touches on the boundless overstatement of the critics and, more importantly, explains what the pardon power actually is – something most people in this debate seem unable to grasp.

Hertzberg’s piece covers a different question – the Clinton question – the question every real admirer of this guy (a group in which I very much count myself) has many times pondered. That is, why and how Clinton turns the Superman comic book metaphor on its head. How this empathetic, brilliant, supremely- politically-gifted, well-meaning man now and again ducks off into a telephone booth, wrestles off his tie, rips off his workaday suit, and pops back out again … a moron.

There’s simply no other way to put it. This isn’t a matter of trashing the former president. I’m as happy today as I ever have been to defend him against his critics who would puff up his screw-ups into criminality or treason.

But what makes this imperfection so interesting and trying and intractable is that Clinton’s lapses are cut from the same cloth as his greatness — looked at closely one is, unfortunately, hard to imagine without the other.

In the end, however, he often ends up looking better than his graceless accusers whose venality and malice and witlessness is planned, protracted and considered, whereas his offenses are more often merely impulsive, abrupt and foolish.

Not the way the cheap, one-trick-pony moralizers would put it. But, hey, this ain’t their site.

That’s my story — and I’m stickin’ with it.

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