The Hillary Smear

I've always been a little puzzled by the right wing hatred of Hillary Clinton. Forests have been felled to describe this woman's malign intent, and for the most part what we have gotten out of the effort is 1) a whole lot of dreck, often involving assertions that she is a deranged radical and/or a leftist 2) evidence that she is highly ambitious, and 3)evidence that she can be cold and/or mercurial.

Now, I'm willing to believe numbers 2 and 3, because they describe, well, a whole lot of people in Washington (and a lot of toher places), and virtually everyone in the Senate. I have a harder time with number 1. Hilary's about as centrist as you can get. We're not talking about Dennis Kucinich here. And it's not as though she's cranking out bills to bring back price controls.

I bring this up since Edward Klein has now officially released his hit job on Senator Clinton, which asserts, among other things, that the Senator is a lesbian; that Bill Clinton raped her to conceive Chelsea; and that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose seat Hillary took when he retired, despised her.

Klein's novel form of journalism does not seem to involve interviewing people. In fact, it seems to involve making things up each morning when he brushes his teeth. Here's a nice debunking of it:

"Ed Klein, author of the book in question, The Truth About Hillary, alleges that New York’s late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan "despised" Mrs. Clinton, that he once hid in a cloakroom to terminate a conversation with her. Nonsense. I think I know Senator Moynihan better than Mr. Klein, because he was my father. Mr. Klein also claims firsthand knowledge of a meeting between my parents and Mrs. Clinton that took place in their apartment in Washington. It was during this meeting that Mrs. Clinton, then the nation’s First Lady, discussed the idea of running for the seat my father was about to vacate.

Mr. Klein puts quotes around statements that were never uttered. I can confirm this because the only other persons present during this meeting were myself and our Tibetan cook, who speaks about 10 words of English. Mr. Klein has now gone on the record to say that he spent "several hours interviewing Mrs. Moynihan." Puzzling indeed, in that Mrs. Moynihan—my mother—hasn’t seen Mr. Klein in over 20 years. I’d like to see the transcripts or hear the tapes of his on-the-record talks with Mrs. Moynihan. And it would have been difficult for him to interview Senator Moynihan, because he’s dead."

So the book is full of lies. No real surprise there. Here's the real question: why even bother with such patently false attacks? The answer is the mileage they get out of it. The Hilary-hating business isn't just for whackos anymore. Klein's book has been excerpted in Vanity Fair, a magazine with a pretty liberal reputation--which tells us something about the "liberal" media. We don't see Michael Moore's nonsense getting excerpted in the American Spectator, after all...

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