"We can stick to the issues to go after Hillary where we disagree with her. There is no need to make up things or to pass along innuendo," comments Teresa of Technicalities re our previous post, where we ventured out into the tempest swirling around the teapot of Amazon's new #1 bestseller, Ed Klein's The Truth about Hillary. Peggy Noonan, who's already read the book -- not to mention written her own book on the subject a couple of years back, The Case Against Hillary Clinton -- agrees:
Mr. Klein's problem is that he assumes the market is conservative and conservatives are stupid. They're not, actually. They want solid sourcing and new information that is true.
But he ignores the Rosetta stone of Hillary studies, the senior college thesis she wrote on leftist organizer Saul Alinsky and how to change the American political culture, which her alma mater, Wellesley College, obligingly continues to suppress on her request . . . Mr. Klein famously suggests again and again that Hillary is, was or will be homosexual.
Meanwhile, in a gossipy WaPo "review" Tina Brown -- former boss of author Klein when Brown was Editor of Vanity Fair -- was fresh off "a fancy all-girls lunch party on Fifth Avenue on Tuesday [where] 'Ed Slime' was a withering topic of conversation." Reading straight from the Hillary playbook, Tina and the girls were caught up in the Hillary-as-victim spin machine:
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that misogyny is a sure boomerang.
Not having swallowed the Kool Aid, Peggy, back at Opinion Journal, viewed Klein's gloves-off approach as a virtue:
This is hard-guy politics: Run for office and we'll throw everything we can that will stick and things that won't stick too. Mr. Klein's book is in this tradition. It treats Hillary as she has claimed she wants to be treated: not as a special case but like everyone else; not as a minority, not as a woman. Mr. Klein isn't scared by her sex.
Tina reports that "at the Fifth Avenue girls' lunch, the question most asked was":
At what point is a successful woman permitted to move on? If George W. Bush can be born again and be absolved for his dopey frat-boy past and eat his National Guard records, when does Hillary get to slough off the ancient scaly legends of her relationship with Bill and the hoary old hide-and-seek of her Rose Law Firm files?
Let's put it this way, Tina. At what point is a successful MAN permitted to move on? GW was relentlessly hounded with apocryphal tales and "false but accurate" memos about his past throughout last year's campaign. But, as our reader Tara notes, we already know there's a double standard out there:
The Today Show gave Kitty Kelly a couple of days to discuss her book on the Bushes . . . remember she supposedly had Neil Bush's ex-wife as the source of W's cocaine use at Camp David when his Dad was Prez . . . Sharon Bush later denied she was Kelly's source but I recall no one on the Dem side calling this a "smear" on Bush.
Even so, the bottom line for "girls" on both side of the aisle seems to be that while the the book may "energize the bases" left and right, it won't change any minds and could even help Hillary in the long run. As Peggy notes:
Dick Morris says its sensational charges will only "embolden" her. They will certainly tend to inoculate her against future and legitimate criticism and revelations. The book is poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.
"The real problem with Hillary biographies is that the picture they paint, if it is true, is difficult for a normal person to believe," concludes Peggy, author of Père Bush's shimmering "thousand points of light" simile*:
No one could be that bad. No one who has risen so high in American politics could possibly be that bad. To believe is to go to a dark place.
Well, as our own previous tinfoil-hat-wearing post attests, that dark place is where we live.
*This is America: the Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of Ahepa, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC, "Holy Name" -- a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.
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