Hitchens reviews that bilious pile of twaddle that is Sidney Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars:
Not long ago in this magazine David Brooks mapped a political sociology elaborating on the notion that the country was in theory divisible between heartland “red” districts and more coastal “blue” ones, the colors showing (rather counterintuitively, perhaps) a respective difference between Republican and Democratic areas. Soon afterward one of Bill Clinton’s reliable yes-men, Paul Begala, issued a response, asserting that it was in “red” districts that gay men like Matthew Shepard were lynched, or black men like James Byrd were dragged behind pickup trucks until they died.
If this meant anything, it meant that the difference between a donkey and an elephant was the difference between democracy and fascism, or between pluralism and absolutism. But just wait for the good people’s party to be caught doing something shady or vile; at once you will be told that it’s no worse than what the bad people’s party would do or has done. Immediately, in other words, the apologist will admit that the game is up, and that he is judging his own team by a standard (of ghastliness in others) that he himself helped to set. “They all do it” means, in this circle, “We all do it.” But the apologist won’t concede this consciously or honestly. Faced with the task of explaining the Clinton pardons, including one to Marc Rich, Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior Clinton adviser and friend of Dick Morris’s, immediately responds, in The Clinton Wars, that Richard Nixon pardoned Jimmy Hoffa; and as for the $190,000 in gifts accumulated by the Clintons, it was “roughly the same amount as the preceding Bushes had accepted.” Since he elsewhere accuses the Republican Party of being essentially lawless and segregationist, he might admit that he’s setting himself a low standard.
M. Scott Eiland
I differ from Christopher Hitchens on many, many issues, but the man is honest and thorough, and the demolition job he does on Blumenthal here is all the more fascinating when you know that the men were friends at one time. Hitchens sums up Clinton perfectly in the last sentence of the review when he calls him “the Nixon of the liberals.”
The Admiral
Authors, no matter what they write or to whom they were aligned, cannot cover the damage Clinton did to himself. His history has alreay been inscribed in the minds of nearly everyone. For supporters, he was great and his transgressions are all forgotten. For me, his legacy is a blue dress, absurd pardons, failure to protect America, purjury, etc ad nauseam.