Over the past couple years, every time I see Bill Clinton in an interview or on TV or simply giving a speech, it always strikes me how god damn happy he looks. Not happy like you finally got the girl who sits at the end of the bar in the sack and not happy like you won the DVD player at the company picnic, but happy like deep spiritual contentment. Like nothing in the world could faze his stilo. He looks much more like a drunken Buddhist sage skipping down some Tibetal yak trail than an ex-president and that’s not something you’re used to seeing in this country.

Last night I was watching the inaugration of his new presidential library in Little Rock. There were certainly some subtle and not so subtle political undertones as George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush expressed their admiration and Bill Clinton expressed his gratitude.

With all the wisdom of a Buddhist sage, this is, in part, what Clinton said:

I believe the job of a president is to understand and explain the time in which he serves, to set forth a vision of where we need to go and a strategy of how to get there, and then to pursue it with all his mind and heart, bending only in the face of error or new circumstances and the crises which are unforeseen, a problem that affects us all.

When I became president, the world was a new and very different place. And I thought about how we ought to confront it. America has two great dominant strands of political thought; we’re represented up here on this stage: conservatism, which at its very best draws lines that should not be crossed, and progressivism, which at its very best breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place. It seemed to me that in 1992, we needed to do both to prepare America for the 21st century.”

Meanwhile, as the NY Times reports:

George W. Bush praised Mr. Clinton’s late mother, Virginia Kelley, as a “working woman and a widow” who raised a son who went on to remind Americans that “Christ admonished us that our lives will be judged by how we do unto the least of our neighbors,” and did his best to live up to that call.

Two nights ago I went up to En Fuego in Del Mar to have a couple beers with two of my homies. Well, a homie and my homie’s homie, I suppose. They’re both Republicans, both biotech scientists. One of them works for Merck, the producer of the called back drug Vioxx, which is being heavily investigated by the Senate to make sure they didn’t know about the heart attack and stroke risks associated with the drug.

So he was rapping to us about how he’s a little nervous about what might happen with the investigation and how there’s been a recent backlash in the media against the FDA’s failure to regulate the safetly and efficacy of drugs as well as America’s tendency to overprescribe drugs when they are not really necessary.

Of course it has long been the position of the biotech sector and many conservatives in general that the FDA is too regulatory.

Oops, gotta run, anyway, I learned a lot last night in watching the senate grill the FDA director and CEO of Merck. There’s a lot of fixing to be done.