Napoleon, Kinky Friedman Edmund Hillary and Lorena Bobbit (or: The Clinton Quartet)

(Perhaps so but politicians remain the cheapest sell-by-dates on the calendar…)

You know, you read about modern-day parliamentarians and their feeble expenses scams and you can’t help but compare their behaviour rather unfavourably with the much more entertainingly lurid corruption of the old Roman empire.

Sure, our present Masters of the Universe also consider themselves above the law but they translate this into moats, duck floats and the odd exaggerated gardening bill – which isn’t quite in the same category as emperor’s Caligula elevating his horse to the position of senator and marrying & killing (& deifying) his pregnant sister.

Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew Boys had a (deeply underground) hit with their ‘They ain’t making Jews like Jesus anymore.’

Which may be true enough but they sure as Hell don’t make leaders like they used to anymore. As the following example shows:

“Lord Horatio Nelson was giving orders 30 minutes after his arm was amputated, according to journals in the National Archive that illustrate the importance of medical skill in securing Britain’s naval might.”

These days, politicians prefer to hang on the coat tails of those who genuinely go out and do stuff, casting themselves as heroes in a shadow theatre – even contorting those genuine shadows into ludicrous self-aggrandising figures on the wall.

Enter Hillary Clinton:

“Mr Clinton’s claim that Hillary was named in honour of Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who conquered Mount Everest, has created more interest here than the former president’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Hillary herself has attributed her moniker to the mountaineer. But the story has a fundamental problem: Edmund Hillary reached Everest’s peak on May 29, 1953, nearly seven years after the infant Hillary arrived in the world.”

It’s probably safe to say that after that debacle (and her false assertion of having been under sniper fire in Sarajevo) Mrs Clinton will stay away from historic figures for a bit.

Which is rather a pity, since there is one particular guy she might well have wanted to emulate, more than once.

What with dubious cigars & intern stories, she might have wished to do with one of her chubby hubby’s cigar clipper what a certain priest did to the dying Napoleon:

“The owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out (sorry) from the professor’s collection of medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler drawings.”

You have to admit that ‘administering last rites’ sounds ever so much classier than ‘Doing a Bobbit.’

(Now, THIS IS A MUCH BETTER EXAMPLE of truth in political advertising standards…)