THURSDAY: Friend, are you really able to have...

THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2026

...more than one thing on your mind? Is Bill Clinton on the level? 

This morning, we showed you some of what he said about his reason for taking those plane trips with Jeffrey Epstein. In our view, this statement poses a question to each of us who have survived the current political era—a ludicrous era after which so very little remains:

PRESIDENT CINTON (2/27/26): When I left office, we had done all the preliminary work to set up the global funds on HTV malaria, but it was not yet funded. And there were other instruments and institutions who were later founded, including President Bush's PEPFAR program. It had not yet been funded.

There were only 200,000 people in the entire developing world who had AIDS medicine, most of them in Brazil, which had a big drug operation on its own, and in Thailand, which also had its own drug population.

In Africa, there were like 30,000 people or something, just next to no people, and they were dying like flies. And I thought we had found a way to drastically drive the price down, and that if we could drive the price down, we could empower people to administer the medicine right, we could save a lot of lives, and I was obsessed with it, and I was being helped by a man named Ira Magaziner who had helped us in the White House in whom I had known since we lived as road scholars together in 1960s. 

So anyway, that's why, when Larry Summers said this, I thought, "Well, this would be great." And so we followed up and took the trips. 

That's President Clinton's account of his outlook after leaving the White House. It's also his explanation of why he took four or five trips to foreigh ocales on Jeffrey Epstein's plane:

Out there in the rest of the world, people were dying from AIDS like flies—and he thought he could save a lot of livres. He even said that he was obsessed with the possibility. 

Our questions:

Do you believe that some such thing is true? Do you believe that some such thing could be true? Do you believe that some such thing could be true about Bill Clinton? 

Or has your sense of who Bill Clinton is, has it been eaten alive by something like forty years in which our garbage can American discourse has endlessly focused on one topic—his sexuality, possibly just as we imagine it? 

We're inclined to think the best about Bill Clinton. We're inclined to throw up our hands in despair when we encounter constructs of the type we see below about this largely mythologized person.

Molly Jong-Fast is a good decent person. On February 7, her guest essay for the New York Times started off like this:

Now We Know What All Those People Got From Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein, as has become clear again with the latest Department of Justice file dump, will go down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social climber. He knew pretty much everybody, name-dropping, favor-trading, sex-trafficking and possibly blackmailing his way all the way up, up, up.

[...]

Many people stuck with him even after he had gone to jail in 2008 in Florida for sex crimes, and in some cases even after he landed in jail again in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. Back then, the plight of the victims often seemed to be an afterthought. That’s most likely because whatever they received from him in the past—access to career-enhancing people, access to young girls and an endless supply of freebies—might still be on offer. This is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.

Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr. Epstein’s jet, or a weekend at his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a charity or school. Or a job for their kid working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr. Allen’s own kid to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall, Swedish blonde.” Other times it was a young woman who might be a “a little freaked by the age difference.”

So wrote Jong-Fast for the New York Times. She was listing the various things (some) people wanted to get from the criminal Epstein. 

For the record, at least as it seems to exist: 

In the case of Bill Clinton, he didn't "stick with [Epstein] even after he had gone to jail in 2008." He says his association with Epstein ended in 2003, long before he was publicly charged with sex crimes. As far as we know, that account hasn't been challenged. 

Also, he didn't want a Prada bag. He did want some flights on Epstein's jet—but to judge from his testimony and from the apparent public record, he wanted those flights because he was building a program to confront AIDS in the world.

Are you able, at this point, to believe that something like that could be the actual truth of the matter? Or has the constant sexualizing of Clinton made it hard for you to picture him in any other context?

Certain elements of the society have pushed that line of interest forever. Jong-Fast is a good, decent person, but we think the following passage from her column may qualify as a document drawn from the soul of the age:

There are numerous ways to look foolish and creepy in the Epstein files, the worst of which is obviously emails like the one Peter Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein in 2016, eight years after Mr. Epstein became a registered sex offender: “Pussy is, indeed, low-carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” Everyone has surely by now seen the photo of the erstwhile Prince Andrew with his arm around a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre. There’s also a photo of Bill Clinton in a hot tub.

She cites the ways three different people managed "to look foolish and creepy in the Epstein files" To wit:

One man wrote a pathetic, slimy email. (For more of that general sort of thing, put on the Fox News Channel pretty much any night of the week.)

Another man was photographed with his arm around an Epstein survivor, now deceased, when she was just 17.

That's how those guys came out looking creepy. Also, Bill Clinton once sat in a hot tub! Plus, there's a photo to prove it!

You never hear about those lives allegedly saved around the world. We've suggested that there's a reason for that:

No one gives the first flying f*ck about such tedious topics! 

Fellow citizens, what do you think Bill Clinton is like? Where do you get that impression?

Tomorrow: They pried the lid off the can...