asks Christopher Hitchens,
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It’s often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That’s not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter “Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?” in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton “rapid response” team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women’s “issues.”
“Excellent on women’s issues”, they say. Women who respect themselves have every reason to despise the codependent couple, where the wife constantly allowed the philanderer-in-chief to subject her to public humiliation after public humiliation. The foundation of Hillary’s entire political carreer is her being Bill’s compliant wifey.
Women’s issues, indeed.
Hitchens destroys the “White House experience” meme, and goes on,
During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and “experience” to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut.
Hitchens leaves out yet another reason to end the Clinton’s presidential ambitions: America is not a country of inherited rule. Picture Hillary as President, Bill comfortably occupying her Senate seat (with Eliot Spitzer’s help, of course) and Chelsea waiting in the wings.
From pp. 114-116 of No One Left to Lie To:
[I]n the third case I know about [alleging rape or attempted rape by the prospective First Gentleman], which is so far unpublished anywhere, the story came to me without my asking, let alone soliciting. I was in San Francisco, and got a call and later a visit from a very well-known Bay Area journalist and editor. He’s a veteran radical and was once quite a Clinton fan; we’d argued about the man before. He wanted, he said, to disburden himself of the following information.
He (I can’t give his name without identifying her) had once employed a young female assistant. In the early 1970s, Bill Clinton had come out to the Bay Area to see his fiancé [sic] Hillary, who was then working, for some other friends of mine as it happens, as a legal intern in Oakland [for veteran Communist lawyer Robert Treuhaft]. An introduction occurred between young Bill and my friend’s aforementioned assistant. He asked her out for lunch; she accepted. He proposed a walk in Golden Gate Park; she accepted that too. He made a lunge at her; she declined the advance and was rammed, very hard indeed, against a tree-trunk before being rolled in the bushes and badly set-upon. She’s a tall and strong woman, and got away without submitting. She told my friend the same day, and he’d kept it secret for almost thirty years….
Years later, the woman was sitting at her desk when she got a telephone call from Brooke Shearer, who is also Mrs. Strobe Talbot and a veteran of the Clinton kitchen-cabinet. “Bill is thinking of running for office,” said Mrs. Shearer. “He wanted to know if that was all right with you.” My subject was annoyed, but she had retained her old liberal allegiances. She also — see how this keeps coming up? [cf. the rape allegation of Juanita Broaddrick (then Juanita Hickey)] — was thinking of getting engaged and becoming a mother. She replied that she wouldn’t stand in the way of a Clinton candidacy. But I have since talked to two further very respectable San Francisco citizens, who have neither met nor heard of my original informant (nor he of them). I know the woman’s name; I know that she has married well; I know her maiden name at the time of the assault; I know the high-powered Bay Area foundation where she works on good causes; I have communicated with her by Federal Express and by voicemail. I have excellent witnesses who have heard her say that if the story ever breaks she’ll deny it under oath. I don’t blame her — though in our present unshockable moral atmosphere it’s very unlikely that reporters, let alone prosecutors, would ever turn over in bed before consigning the whole thing to the memory hole. It is time, as we keep hearing, to put the country behind us and move this forward. (At least, I think I’ve got that right.)
# # #
Thank you JMK!
And, as Hithchens said, that has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton “rapid response” team of lawyers.