Scandal File

AN Italian journalist of a certain age was telling me about his first trip to Little Rock. “I recognized it immediately,” he said with a wry smile. “The closed atmosphere, the reluctance to be seen talking to an outsider, the background fear . . . just like Sicily.” He had spent years covering the Mafia in his own country, and he was quick to recognize the similarities between the Sicily of his youth and the Arkansas of his maturer years: Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, whose methods and mores have been so brutally and effectively imposed on Washington in the 1990s.

It’s a shame that the tandem of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo has not given us its vision of our present condition, for Clinton and his political/business “family” are right out of The Godfather. Just as the Corleones started in a tiny backwater town and eventually became a vast international criminal organization, so the Clintons have moved from Hope, Arkansas, to exert their corrupt influence on a global scale. The climactic moment of The Godfather, when Al Pacino looks deep into the eyes of his beloved to tell her a bald-faced but comforting lie, has been reprised to the point of monotony by Bill Clinton.

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Michael Ledeen

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AN Italian journalist of a certain age was telling me about his first trip to Little Rock. “I recognized it immediately,” he said with a wry smile. “The closed atmosphere, the reluctance to be seen talking to an outsider, the background fear . . . just like Sicily.” He had spent years covering the Mafia in his own country, and he was quick to recognize the similarities between the Sicily of his youth and the Arkansas of his maturer years: Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, whose methods and mores have been so brutally and effectively imposed on Washington in the 1990s.

It’s a shame that the tandem of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo has not given us its vision of our present condition, for Clinton and his political/business “family” are right out of The Godfather. Just as the Corleones started in a tiny backwater town and eventually became a vast international criminal organization, so the Clintons have moved from Hope, Arkansas, to exert their corrupt influence on a global scale. The climactic moment of The Godfather, when Al Pacino looks deep into the eyes of his beloved to tell her a bald-faced but comforting lie, has been reprised to the point of monotony by Bill Clinton.