As the Irish Taoiseach welcomed the 2023 class of the Washington Ireland Program, some two decades after he served in the office of congressman Jack Quinn via the same program, Leo Varadkar said he believed he was looking at the leaders of the future, and urged them to enjoy the city which prepared him to begin the political career which has seen him twice lead his country. So far, so platitudinous.
The Taoiseach, on a rooftop just across a lawn from the US Capitol, joked about the fact that he interned in the last year of the Clinton presidency “when parents might have had cause for concern about what happened to interns” in the city. Varadkar made the comment just two hours after meeting Hillary, and after he had confirmed the Clintons would visit Northern Ireland next month to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which Bill Clinton was pivotal in securing. The Irish press has gone to town on the clanger.
Irish politicians value their US relationship dearly and always exploit St Patrick’s Day as an opportunity to visit the White House. Even more so with President Joe Biden self-identifying as Irish. He will also meet Vice President Kamala Harris. Which will see two people of Indian descent in positions of power meet to celebrate St Patrick’s Day!
Reporting on Bill Cosby’s shock prison release, presenter Michelle Fleury made an embarrassing blunder by confusing the disgraced comedian with former President Bill Clinton, live on air. Viewers were told:
“For the last two years this has been where Bill Clinton has called home. Tonight he will sleep in his own bed following the bombshell decision by the Pennsylvanian Supreme Court to overturn his conviction of sexual assault.”
Presenter Huw Edwards quickly apologised for the BBC’s gaffe. Freudian slip perhaps…
According to the the New York Post a painting dubbed “Parsing Bill” by a New York-based artist named Petrina Ryan-Kleid hung on the wall of Jeffrey Epstein’s $56 million townhouse. It was of the former president in the famous dress worn by Monica Lewinsky. Until now Guido believed that Epstein did kill himself in jail, given he knew what lay ahead for him. Now however, well, Clinton had motive for this alone… never mind the other rumours…
In 1995 Bill Clinton told Congress in his State of the Union Address that he would implement a proto-Trump immigration crackdown. To a standing ovation he said
The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our Administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.
In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
“Racist in the White House”?
Bill Clinton on Labour and Corbyn:
“They reached the interesting conclusion that they lost because they hadn’t moved far left enough, and so they went out and practically got a guy off the street to be the leader of the British Labor Party… they just want the maddest person in the room to represent them.”
5 minutes of the best lines…
