Mussolini's posturing seems so transparent that you wonder how adults could have taken him seriously. With Hitler, what comes across is crude, passionate intensity and the rapture of his audiences, sharing his feelings, with their minds turned off. What is chilling is knowing now how many tens of millions of human beings lost their lives because of these almost musical-comedy performances.
Shallow stuff can have deep consequences.
Few things today are more shallow than the reasons most people have for supporting President Clinton. Both are grand illusions. She learned the hard way how phony that was when he got gross with her. Bringing the federal deficit under control has been a major achievement, but it is an achievement that no president can legitimately take credit for, since spending and taxing are controlled by Congress. If Congress had passed all the spending bills presented by Bill Clinton, the deficits would be continuing on, in the hundreds of billions of dollars, for years to come.