Memory is a strange thing, and perhaps my memory is particularly strange, due to my adolescent adventures in freelance pharmaceuticals. People sometimes talk about teenagers “experimenting” with drugs. If so, I was the Enrico Fermi of drug experimentation. My college dorm room was to dope what the Manhattan Project was to nuclear physics, and I was Robert Oppenheimer. The findings of my research could be expressed in a simple formula:

Psilocybin + Cocaine = Insanity

Trust me on this one, kids. Anyone foolish enough to attempt to replicate that particular experiment will never completely recover. Once you’ve had the Total Hallucinogenic Freakout, you’re never really the same again, because once you’ve seen The Other Side, you can’t un-see it.

Anyway, the neural pathways of my memory function in an unusual way, so that sometimes I’ll be writing and a phrase or image will pop into my mind and — CAZART! — it’s like I’m re-living a past experience, complete with the exact emotional reaction I felt at that time. Today, while composing a brief response to something somebody wrote on Medium.com, I had a flashback to the title of Christopher Hitchen’s 1999 book No One Left to Lie To. He died a few years ago, but not before I had a chance to hang out with him in D.C., when Marty Beckerman and I spent a good hour (and probably $25) buying Hitch rounds of Johnny Walker Black, just so he would keep telling jokes. God rest his atheist soul, but Hitch could tell a joke better than anyone I ever met. It was not so much the content of his jokes, as it was the form — Hitch had a brilliant delivery and, having heard him do a stand-up performance at the “PlameGate Two” benefit, I insisted that he tell his best jokes for Marty. But I digress . . .

No One Left to Lie To flashed into my mind while I was explaining my own deep resentment of how Bill Clinton screwed me over:

By the way, I used to be a Democrat — a hard-core “yellow dog” who voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, and who proudly put a Clinton-Gore bumper sticker on my car in 1992. What happened? Well, Bill Clinton happened. No sooner had he finished taking the oath of office than he began to enact policies that were anathema to the core values of millions of people who voted for him. Behind his façade of down-home “moderation,” Bill Clinton was a proponent of the 1960s anti-American atheist radicalism of the New Left, and his wife was even more deeply committed to this agenda of the left-wing cultural elite.

Well, I was a Democrat, but I was never a complete fool. Being bamboozled — played for a chump in a political three-card monte hustle — pi–ed me off.

You’re never going to f–k me over twice, and after I take your knife out of my back, I’m gonna remember who put it there. . . .

You can read the whole thing at Medium.com. Oh, how I hated that swindling liar! The fact that he bamboozled me — someone who prides himself on his street-smart cynicism — was simply unforgivable. Say what you will about the GOP, but when the Republicans screw you over, at least they don’t insult you by calling it “social justice.”







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