"Why are you so stupid?"

President Clinton was, perhaps, the first leading Democratic politician to fall victim to the Mighty Wurlitzer. But as illustrated by his righteously angry smackdown of Fox News's Chris Wallace (another example of the decline of the human race, one generation at a time) the other day, he is the first to refuse to roll over in the face of further Swiftboating. David Remnick's thoughtful, even-handed and fascinating (and like a Clinton monologue, long) piece in the New Yorker is further illustration.

That night, Clinton invited the travelling party to Castelli’s, an Italian restaurant on Mahatma Gandhi Street, near the Mercato, the market area. The original owner had come to Ethiopia in the thirties with Mussolini’s occupying army and stayed behind; the family members who run it now speak fluent Amharic. There were plates of marinated eggplant and zucchini, prosciutto di Parma shipped to Djibouti from Italy and driven to Addis; there were two kinds of spaghetti, two of ravioli; there was roast chicken. On the wall were pictures of Jimmy Carter, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie with the owners.

I sat across from Clinton. There were bags under his eyes, and yet he seemed in a good mood, eating, joking around. (He barely touches wine or other alcohol.) And then, without a question or a prodding comment, Clinton started to talk about Whitewater, about Kenneth Starr, about how allowing the appointment of a special prosecutor had been “the worst decision” of his Presidency. He talked about old enemies in Arkansas, about the Resolution Trust Corporation, about Gennifer Flowers, about Susan Schmidt, of the Washington Post (“a Xerox machine for Ken Starr”). This went on for twenty minutes, at least. A few times, when he started pointing across the table, when his carotid artery seemed to inflate like a jammed garden hose, you could see just how deeply he still feels the attacks of the late nineties.

Someone asked him if he thought it would be unbearable to go through all of it again, as he inevitably would if Hillary ran for President in 2008.

“I don’t care,” he said, “because we know we did nothing wrong.”

Later, Clinton’s aides expressed little surprise at his outburst. John Podesta, who had been at the dinner, said, “He can bring it up and be pissed off all over again, but he really has moved on. He reminds himself of what Mandela told him at Robben Island. Clinton asked, ‘How did you forgive your jailers?’ And Mandela said, ‘When I walked out of the gate I knew that if I continued to hate these people I was still in prison.’ Clinton believes it, but he has to keep reminding himself. That story is a little bit of a prayer.”

Despite Clinton’s declarations of inner peace, his “prayer” does not always keep the furies, the old resentments, at bay. “The method he uses to live with himself is to make a clear and precise argument that this was something that others had done to him and not that he had done to himself,” Leon Panetta said. “Because of his brainpower, he can create a logic for anything. But deep down he would be such a good person if he could just accept the fact that he screwed up and made mistakes, and move on. ”

Rahm Emanuel told me that this was too harsh an interpretation, that the attack on the Clintons in the nineties was so severe and baseless, in his view, that a moment of anger over dinner was nothing. He mentioned a recent report in the Chicago Tribune which revealed that the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, began his career in Congress with a net worth of three hundred thousand dollars and now has assets of six million, owing largely to an almost fantastical increase in the value of land near a highway project that he helped push through Congress. “The Speaker came in with three hundred thousand dollars and now has six million in real estate and no one asks a question? Your question is ‘Why is Clinton so angry?’ My question is ‘Why are you so stupid?’”

The whole thing is worth a read (particularly if you're on a cross-country flight).