I thought it was a whitewash. The moral of the story seemed to be that the Clintons, for all their flaws, had the potential for greatness — a boilerplate Clinton press office theme which also emerges in the title of George Stephanopoulos' memoir All Too Human. This message would have been harder to sustain had the film honestly portrayed the full range of Clinton corruption and brutality, rather than focusing on Bill Clinton's sex flings.
Californiajones: "And are there any redeeming qualities at all in Hill or Bill?"
Everyone has redeeming qualities. However, the Clintons possess no qualities so redeeming as to justify appointing either one of them to any office of public trust in these United States, IMHO.
Also what did you think of Ambrose [Evans-]Pritchard's book on them?
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's The Secret Life of Bill Clinton provides the best-sourced, best-written, most complete and most reliable account of Clinton corruption yet produced.
Its chief (and perhaps only) weakness lies in its analysis of the Oklahoma City bombing, which unfortunately ignores the Middle Eastern connection (see The Third Terrorist by Jayna Davis), but nevertheless points correctly to disturbing and unexplained evidence of U.S. government foreknowledge and perhaps actual complicity in the bombing.
The Clinton anti-terror policy was predicated on the assumption that America had more to fear from home-grown, "right-wing" terrorists than from foreign terrorists. Some researchers have charged that, during the Clinton administration, terrorist attacks by Middle Eastern groups were covered up and falsely characterized as accidental (eg. the downing of TWA Flight 800), while the Oklahoma City bombing was used as a showcase to justify the Clinton policy of targeting "rightwing" terrorism almost exclusively.
You may remember that the Clinton White House blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on a general atmosphere of rightwing hysteria generated, they said, by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. Mainstream media took up the chant with an all-out propaganda war against what they called "hate radio." The FBI subsequently launched Project Megiddo — an aggressive intelligence offensive against allegedly violent elements of the Christian Right.
Thus the bombing proved politically useful to the Clintons. But it was only useful as long as the American people were kept in the dark about the fact that OKC bombmaker Terry Nichols had received training in the Philippines from al-Qaida operatives. This fact — if widely reported — would have greatly diluted the propaganda value of the OKC bombing for the Clintons, and was suppressed.
As a former lefty who sat around with other lefties dreaming of the day we could place "one of our own" in the White House, I have always seen the Clinton presidency as the culmination of a conspiracy to bring that dream to fruition. We wanted to SOCIALIZE the economic system and DISMANTLE the "military-industrial complex", as we called it then, and I don't believe HILLARY ever lost that dream.
The ACTIONS of the Clinton presidency can be seen much more clearly if viewed through that prism.
For me, Jayna Davis' contribution to the history not only gives us a middle eastern connection to OKC, but more importantly an IRAQI one. Laurie Mylroie's work provides us a specific IRAQI connection to the '93 WTC bombing.
I do not find it far-fetched that Bill and Hillary Clinton would have allied themselves in a clandestine manner with the one person in the world who had not only the motive to assist in this endeavor but who also could benefit greatly from the weakening of America's military might.
The Clinton administration's actions while in office vis-a-vis Iraq, all seemed to benefit SADDAM. OKC saved the Clinton presidency, am I too far out there to see a quid-pro-quo between OKC and subsequent actions on Iraq which greatly benefited Saddam?