Bubba's Heart Attack

[James Brody]

In September 2006 I attended a Pat Buchanan event and seized the moment, while Buchanan signed books, to suggest privately to the host that Bill Clinton might not be so persuasive in his wife's campaigns. My reason: 1) Mr. Clinton's cardiac surgery and 2) changes that I experienced after my own bypass in 1989. This provoked a chin stroke and an "interesting" while the host stared into the emptying auditorium.

The docs don't necessarily mention losing part of yourself on the operating table. It makes sense to expect such and that they would be quiet about it. After all, there's a lot of junk that may be knocked loose as you are cooled down, opened up, re-piped, and sewn up. I lost working memory and experienced an overwhelming urge to greet total strangers as if they were old friends. The former got better with months after surgery, the latter I managed by a rule: "If I'm certain that I know you then I don't."

The more enduring effect has been a loss of reserve capacity: make me hungry, tire me, or pickle me with a little wine, and my post-surgical conditions become more apparent. Speech slows, word retrieval become uncertain, and there are silent moments in mid sentence while I search for a term (A recent brush with flu had the same effect, even though 18 years have passed since my adventure at Lankenau. I would have to look in order to position my left hand on the keyboard and find a few seconds later than the hand had moved with my having no sense of what was happening. About three days ago, the smooth alternation between the fingers of my left and right hand returned so that I can type a password without staring at my fingers. I felt like having a party!)

My foreboding about Clinton may well have been accurate. After all, these progressive thugs should have kept Obama from getting out of his senate seat! On the contrary, a number of incidents have embarrassed her and perhaps him, incidents that may depend on fatigue and a campaign that is not the coronation they perhaps expected. It is also likely for her to become bewildered when her partner is off his game and weakens hers. His altered physiological reserves for sustained, high-effort accomplishment can leave him impatient, irritable, impulsive, and dogmatic.

The surprise: the "world's smartest woman" nearly always gets caught when she lies or steals. She now appears, without Bill at the top of his game, to be a rather ordinary dope who couldn't hold a two-bit part on the Sopranos.

JimB


"Bill Clinton's tirade stunned some delegates
"Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross
"Wednesday, April 2, 2008
"The Bill Clinton who met privately with California's superdelegates at last weekend's state convention was a far cry from the congenial former president ... According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage...But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama...It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade...."

More at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...type=printable.

See also:

Peggy Noonan, 2/15/08. "Confidence or Derangement," Wall Street Journal.

"To top it all off, Mrs. Clinton has, for 30 years, held deep respect for her husband's political acumen, for his natural, instinctive sense of how to campaign. And he's never let her down. Now he's flat-footed, an oaf lurching from local radio interview to finger-pointing lecture. Where did the golden gut go? How did his gifts abandon him? " http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1203...n_commentaries


BILL CLINTON LASHES OUT AT OBAMA SUPPORTER...
VIDEO: Lashes Out at Pro-Life Students...
http://www.drudgereport.com/ 02/18/08

[James Brody]

Saturday mornings, between 6AM and 10AM bring Mark Simone's easy banter. He fills the hours with New York gossip (ho hum), interviews with political and entertainment icons (better), and polical analysis (pretty good).

A caller remarked that some of Bill Clinton's irregular performance may have been a side effect of his heart attack. Simone acknowledged receiving several serious letters to that effect (mine was one of them) but that some bypass recipients are better than ever.

The scarey thing is that after a bypass, your self-monitoring abilities may the be very things that are impaired. You become more impulsive in some ways but the other parts of your mind that are used to a less-impulsive style will have their moments of dissonance. Eventually, the new organization follows Kuramoto: similarity and influence lead to synchrony.

In the Clinton "extended mind," Hillary could have awakened one morning and realized that a vital part of her "self" was missing. If so, the sensation was of similar nature but of greater impact to what she might have felt after she caught on to Monica.

JimB

[James Brody]

"April 24, 2008, 7:53 pm

"Black Leader in House Denounces Bill Clinton's Remarks

"By Mark Leibovich

"The third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives and one of the country's most influential African-American leaders sharply criticized former President Bill Clinton this afternoon for what he called Mr. Clinton's "bizarre" conduct during the Democratic primary campaign."
More at: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ntons-remarks/

More at: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ntons-remarks/

[James Brody]

Magnificent essay, one that lets you know how much the writer misses the Clinton that once was with us! There is compassion, there is detail, and perhaps, an oblique window into the adjustments that Hillary has faced if it's true that her first defender and first offender has become lame. Purdum questions Clinton's preferences for younger friends, male or female, his temper, his carelessness, and his comparative immaturity. Medical aspects may puppeteer much of what we now see and Purdum gives one of the best summaries I have ever seen in regard to post-by-pass complications...

Now, are we ready to consider the role of phlebitis, clots, and deterioration in Nixon's behavior?


JimB

"Bubba Trouble"
"The Comeback Id"
Todd S. Purdum
Vanity Fair, July, 2008

"...As a White House correspondent for The New York Times for more than two years, I spent some part of almost every day watching, thinking about, worrying about, or writing about Clinton and his never-a-dull-moment presidency. I found it hard not to admire his roving intellect, his protean political talents, his outsize personality, and the tactical skill with which he eventually confronted the Republican congressional majority that bedeviled so much of his tenure. Clinton had no use for the string of pure and noble losers that had come to define the Democratic Party's presidential prospects for so long. He wanted to win, and he knew how. (I should add, by way of disclosure, that my wife, Dee Dee Myers, was Clinton's first press secretary. They have not been in regular contact since she left the White House, and she has not been a source for this article.)

"To know Clinton is, sooner or later, to be exasperated by his indiscipline and disappointed by his shortcomings. But through it all, it has been easy enough to retain an enduring admiration—even affection—for a president whose sins against decorum and the dignity of his office seemed venial in contrast to the systemic indifference, incompetence, corruption, and constitutional predations of his successor's administration. That is, easy enough until now.

"This winter, as Clinton moved with seeming abandon to stain his wife's presidential campaign in the name of saving it, as disclosures about his dubious associates piled up, as his refusal to disclose the names of donors to his presidential library and foundation and his and his wife's reluctance to release their income-tax returns created crippling and completely avoidable distractions for Hillary Clinton's own long-suffering ambition, I found myself asking again and again, What's the matter with him?"... "There are those friends who worry that Clinton has never been the same since his quadruple-bypass surgery, in 2004, and the unexpected follow-up operation six months later to remove accumulated scar tissue on his lung.

"'There's an anger in him that I find surprising,' one senior aide, who has known and served both Clintons for years, told me this spring. 'There seems to be an abiding anger in him, and not just the summer thunderstorms of old. He has been called into question repeatedly by top staff....Many of those who know him well say he now tires more easily, and loses energy.

"Post-Op Complications

"'That is hardly surprising: not quite four years ago, Clinton underwent quadruple-bypass surgery to relieve blocked arteries in his heart, a procedure whose comparative commonness in the modern medical world belies the range of subtle, complex, and not always obvious complications that can follow it. 'He's recovered much, much more slowly from the heart surgery than anybody thought,' one former aide told me. 'He still has energy, but not stamina. He can recover, but he used to do that nonstop, with three hours' sleep."

Lots more at: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f...?currentPage=1