Clinton and Gingrich on C-SPAN Radio (#233, Topic P)

C-SPAN TV has a sister station, C-SPAN Radio, which provides commercial-free coverage of speeches/press-conferences by VIPs either live or only days old. It is a good source of information that is not readily available in print media. I stumbled onto it recently, to which I now set my alarm as my morning call. Yesterday, I woke up to a speech by former president Bill Clinton at a public forum held at Georgetown university. The occasion was to commemorate his presidential-candidate speech given at the same university 15 years ago. When I tuned in, Clinton was in the midst of talking his administration's having a budget surplus, citing the advantages of a balanced budget to middle-income households, particularly on interest and on funding for social security. He then asked his listeners (apparently GU students) to be more inquisitive, more doubting, and less accepting without thinking. A passage I remembered the best are words to the following effect: If members of Christianity [GU was founded by Jesuits], Judaism, Islam -- and, for that matter, Hinduism and Buddhism -- claim that their religion is the truth, they do not know what they are talking about. This morning, it was former Republican speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich, speaking at Johns Hopkins University. He was probably on a book-promotion tour, as his speech made frequent reference to what he wrote in this "little book." His message: USA, vis-a-vis the world, has two options: either an elegant decadance (his words) or competition; he, of course, urged his audience, university students mainly, to elect the latter course. During the Q&A session, a student asked: Why not offer cooperation as another option? In response, Grinich admitted that the two options he offered for USA (and, perhaps, written up in his book) were intended for dealing with China; with China, cooperation is not an option. Very sobering.