Posted on 05/21/2003 8:03:22 AM PDT by Mia T
The Clinton Wars: Stockholm Syndrome Revs Spinning Sid
Sidney Blumenthal's corpulent opus, The Clinton Wars, inadvertently captures the REAL clinton legacy notwithstanding clinton directive to the contrary.
As the first installment of the clinton revisionism trilogy -- (Living History, the missus's upcoming title, a not very artful intersection of delusion, deception, subliminal suggestion and pre-emptive payoff, is next to hit the shelves) -- The Clinton Wars inadvertently, stupidly actually, provides an unobstructed view into the twisted, corrupt world of clinton delusion and dysfunction by its own realtime demonstration thereof.
Like the clintons and their hagiographer, the turgid tome is humorless, flatulent, fraudulent, provincial, self-serving and an utter failure. The clintons and Blumenthal are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.
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The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Score-settling and self-importance aside, Robert Dallek finds this memoir a "powerful and generally persuasive defense of Bill, Hillary and Blumenthal." Almost everyone else disagrees. In the New York Review of Books, Joseph Lelyveld suggests that Blumenthal has Clintonian Stockholm syndrome, calling the book a rough draft of the Clintons' upcoming memoirs. "It's difficult to imagine that either Clinton will defend the president's record more enthusiastically or unwaveringly than Blumenthal," cracks the Los Angeles Times' Ronald Brownstein, who complains that "ultimately [Blumenthal] is too much the believer to be believed." And in the New York Observer, Blumenthal's ideological enemy (and former editor at the New Republic) Andrew Sullivan paints the author as a lovable dupe, suggesting that the Clintons "used him for his propagandistic skills and his fawning loyalty. They used him to drape their own modest but defensible record with the patina of world-historical significance. And they used him to lie to one another. Some people would find that demeaning. It tells you a lot about Sidney Blumenthal that he regards it as an achievement worth recording for the ages." To read Michael Isikoff's take on the book, click here, and click here for Timothy Noah's reactions, both in Slate.
Love Thy Old Boss |
The point is not that Blumenthal is a hypocrite (although he seems to be exactly that). The point is that throughout this book Blumenthal seems utterly incapable of understanding how his own uncompromising, take-no-prisoners defense of the Clintons contributed to the poisonous political atmosphere that he bemoans. Time and again, in the book as in life, he rearranges facts, spins conspiracy theories, impugns motives, and besmirches the character of his political and journalistic foes--
all for the greater cause of defending the Clintons (and himself). Hyde, Kenneth Starr, Hickman Ewing, Lindsey Graham, Tom DeLay--
each was malicious, narrow-minded, bigoted, buffoonish, and anti-democratic. Meanwhile, Blumenthal wonders repeatedly why so many people dislike him. At one point, bizarrely, he suggests it is because he is "intellectual" and "Jewish."
But it is abundantly clear that distortion is standard fare for Blumenthal. Although there are slivers of truth in most of what he writes, the facts are dishonestly rearranged to settle scores or whitewash his and the Clintons' actions.
Consider one small example: Blumenthal's effort to extricate himself and Hillary Clinton from a clumsy attempt to build a White House dossier on Susan Schmidt, the Washington Post's most aggressive reporter on Whitewater. Blumenthal's role in this vaguely Nixonian exercise was first reported five years ago in a story by the Post's media reporter, Howard Kurtz. When Michael McCurry, who was then press secretary, learned of the project, he proclaimed it "crazy" and killed it. Instead of admitting his involvement, Blumenthal pretends that he was a passive party. After hearing "constant complaints" about Schmidt's reporting from White House legal aides, he writes, he suggested they "should present the facts to the Post to correct any errors. Beyond that, I never knew about a study of Schmidt's reporting. I asked Hillary Clinton, and she had no memory of anything either."
But others do remember--quite differently, as it turns out. Mark Fabiani, the White House lawyer who ran the counsel offices' "damage control" team, said he recalls getting a phone call from Blumenthal strongly urging him to do a report on Schmidt. When Fabiani didn't follow up, he then got a call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff instructing him to get moving on the job. This led to the preparation of a lengthy dossier (one that did little to effectively discredit Schmidt, according to Fabiani) and a series of meetings--including one with Hillary Clinton--about what to do with it. The White House lawyers knew exactly what had happened, says Fabiani. "We all laughed about it. We knew [Blumenthal] had called Hillary and told Hillary this should be done.
He was sort of the brooding, omnipresence over the whole thing."
I wrote about Blumenthal's courthouse deceptions in my own book Uncovering Clinton. So I when I picked up The Clinton Wars I was mildly curious to see how he would handle the subject. Would he show the slightest contrition for his deceptive public statements? Not at all. In The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal recounts in exhaustive, self-congratulatory detail how he turned the table on Starr.
If The Clinton Wars has any central point it is that the scandals that beset the Clinton presidency--from Whitewater to campaign finance to Lewinsky to Marc Rich--were each and every one of them entirely concocted, from start to finish. This is patently absurd.
Blumenthal's blanket whitewash is close to ludicrous--and sustainable only by erasing huge chunks of the historical record.
About Whitewater, Blumenthal has this to say: "There was never anything to in the beginning, middle or end." What convinced him? In January 1994, Hillary Clinton called him into her office and told him so. "I believed Hillary Clinton," he writes. "Her telling of the story Ķ sounded convincing; her demeanor struck no false notes."
As for the Lewinsky matter--
it was all very simple: It was about the efforts of rigid, culturally repressed conservatives like Starr to use sex as a "tracer" and a "code" to thwart progressive politics. Remember Vernon Jordan's phone call to Revlon to get Lewinsky a job--
made just days after Clinton's lawyers learned that Lewinsky was on a witness list in the Paula Jones case? There's barely a mention of that. What does Blumenthal have to say about Clinton's famous session with presidential secretary Betty Currie right after he testified falsely in his deposition? ("I was never alone with Monica, right?" he said. "Monica came on to me and I never touched her, right?") He never talks about it.
"It is my serious intent to have written this as a history," Blumenthal recently told the New York Times, insisting that his book was written "dispassionately." But not to belabor the obvious, to write history, you have to have some basic respect for the historical record. You have to make at least some effort at understanding the motivations and thinking of political antagonists--including those you happen to strongly disagree with. Blumenthal has done none of this. His book isn't history; it's one big orgy of political spin.
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All the fuss over the spread-eagle pose and the tie pointing to nothing much.
I think the great untold story of that photo is the scary fisheye distortion of his hands, monstrous rapist's hands, hands that held down Juanita, hands that only underscore his congenital smallness...
It is as though the photographer was saying, "You small - - - - -. I believe Juanita."
bushwhacked by tailhook: the real reason
THE CLINTON RAPES ARE
Reciprocal Intern-Exploitation-Purgation Attempt at JFK Library
"I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine...."
Are Susan Estrich, Al From and The Times on the same "Get the clintons off the stage!" page?...
(Desperately seeking Susan.... Who spiked her, anyway?)
Democratic Party's Problem Transcends Its Anti-War Contingent
CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme FICTIONAL TRILOGY
Q ERTY8PING
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Compare President Bushs magazine cover to clintoon's magazine cover:
Yes, abortion beyond the 16th week from conception is painful for the baby being killed! THAT is what the DNC and McAwful stand for, stand up to defend and champion the continuation of. The DNC is squarely on the line for defending 'murder, inc.'
Democrats, the defenders of Murder Incorporated as enlightened social policy.
The Democrat Party, party of murder to stabilize society and cannibalism to treat your ills.
Word of the Day for Wednesday November 6, 2002- http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2002/11/06.html
circumambient \sur-kuhm-AM-bee-uhnt\, adjective: Surrounding; being on all sides; encompassing.
The self owes its form and perhaps its very existence to the circumambient social order. --Rom Harre, Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology
Facing reality, then, implies accepting one's essential powerlessness, yielding or adjusting to circumambient forces, taking solace in some local pattern or order that one has created and to which one has become habituated. --Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism
It's a voice that does something physical to me, that jumps out of the circumambient air and seizes hold of me like a thing that lives off the blood of other things. --T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
Romantic love . . . rarefies lust into an angelic standoff, a fruitless longing without which our energizing circumambient dreamland of song, film and fiction would be bereft of its main topic. --John Updike, "The Deadly Sins/Lust," New York Times, June 20, 1993
Nevertheless, it's always a treat to read your latest posts.
By now, certainly, clinton antipathy must necessarily extend leftward and upward.
Surely the Ds understand that:
"Free Republic is one of those groups obsessed with the Clinton era." Word's out: Protest at Hillary's tonight
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COMING APART: What clinton was REALLY saying... and why... when he bashed Bush in Canada
the logic of pathologic self-interest
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*Thanx to Cloud William for text and audio
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by Mia T, 1-21-03 Hear clinton stupidity, smallness, banality, fecklessness, ineptitude, prevarication, corruption, perfidy and utter failure directly from the rapist, himself. clinton provides the perfect foil for Bush, who makes a cameo appearance or two. Pay special attention to Dan Rather's little story about terrorism hitting the U.S. "bigtime" during the clintons' tenure. In particular, connect the following dots: the '93 WTC bombing. a certain bin Laden protégé and clinton's admission that he passed up bin Laden. Note clinton's spurious argument for this monumental failure. To this day, clinton seems not to understand that bin Laden is -- and was in 1996 -- an enemy of the state, not a simple criminal. clinton still seems not to get it -- the same terrorist --the terrorist he refused to take--hit the same building in '93. Notwithstanding this, to hear clinton tell it, his disastrous decision not to take bin Laden when offered on a silver platter by Sudan, (arguably the worst decision ever made by a president), derived from his scrupulous avoidance of abusing power and trashing laws... Yeah, right.
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Poison Pen Proves Autotoxic:
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May 25, 2003 -- CONSERVATIVE Washington insiders are lining up to give Sidney Blumenthal a kick in the pants over his latest tome, "The Clinton Wars." Blumenthal is a former White House communications strategist for Bill Clinton. His book - in which he exhaustively attempts to bolster the Clintons' "vast right-wing conspiracy" theory - charges that gay writer David Brock, once a right-wing hero, was "excommunicated" from conservative power circles after complaining about anti-homosexual statements made by columnist Gary Aldrich. "Conservatives in Washington, led by a lobbyist, Craig Shirley, bruited it about that Brock was failing the cause because he was upset by Aldrich's gay-bashing," Blumenthal writes. Shirley - whose public-relations firm, Shirley & Bannister, reps books by Aldrich as well as Ann Coulter and Katherine Harris - begs to differ. "Knowing his behavior over many years and knowing his obsession with the 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' I can say that Sidney Blumenthal is a deeply disturbed paranoiac in need of clinical assistance," Shirley tells PAGE SIX's Ian Spiegelman. In a letter to Blumenthal, Shirley refers to the book as "your latest love paean to Bill and Hillary," charging, "That you did not source the charge or have the decency to call me to verify it proves you have no interest in the truth." The missive continues, "I don't want a retraction because, frankly, I don't care what you write or think . . . except when you deliberately write falsehoods. I suspect most of Washington shares this opinion. "For the record, I never said anything about David Brock's lifestyle as you falsely charge, nor did I ever hear any other conservatives take notice. Who was your source? Stephen Glass? Jayson Blair?" "He made it up, that's all," Shirley insists. "This guy lives in La-La Land." Asked if he's read the whole book, Shirley says, "I've thumbed through it, but it's like sticking your head in the sewer - I already know what's down there."
Why we were compelled to hit on Simon & Schuster,our personal agitprop & money-laundering machine) |
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