Creative Editing

Look at this stupid sentence from Ben Shapiro's latest article.

war in Iraq skews President Bush's

Look at that. It's not even a complete sentence. President Bush's what? It makes no sense, and shows what a dimwit Ben Shapiro is.

Oh it makes more sense than I thought. Apparently these other words around that fragment were part of the sentence too.

No doubt the unpopular war in Iraq skews President Bush's numbers, but there is something more going on: Americans relate to President Clinton in a unique way.

Oh well. I guess that's my mistake.

Of course Shapiro makes a similar mistake himself, by faulting President Bush's mention of his age during a speech to the World AIDs conference in Toronto on the 15th of this month.

On August 15, former President Bill Clinton addressed a world AIDS conference in Toronto. "In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it's true," he stated. "For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing what I was doing. Then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room. Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day."

Turning 60 is certainly a bummer for a man as reliant on his prostate as Clinton is. Nonetheless, Clinton's speech was a stunning testament to his egocentricity. Who whines about a post-midlife crisis while discussing a disease that has pushed Angola's average life span to 39.9 years, Zambia's to 39.7, and Zimbabwe's to 37.9? Who tells a roomful of people worried about the devastation caused by a global plague that he is personally devastated by having another birthday?

Bill Clinton, that's who.

Kind of sounds like Clinton was given a microphone, stood up, and whined about aging for 40 minutes or so. The truth is a bit less narcissistic. First of all he didn't say it at the conference - he said it to reporters outside of the conference. If you look at the transcript of the roundtable he participated in (as I did), those words don't appear.

What does appear is a man who is seriously engaged with a serious problem. But that doesn't fit young Ben's narrative so he leaves it out. His narrative presents a shallow narcisstic dimwit who is the antithesis of the serious minded person we have in the White House now. You know the guy who can't believe that the Iraqis don't love us and really enjoys a good fart joke.

I guess Ben does have an uphill climb to convince us of that; a few misstatements along the way are bound to happen.