"...Hope this book gets wide distribution."
...BUMP!
Posted on 05/25/2007 11:56:20 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton alleges she masterminded efforts to cover up Bill Clinton's draft record during the 1992 campaign - and coolly executed a "20-year project" to place both spouses into the Oval Office regardless of their marital woes.
"Her Way," a decidedly unauthorized biography written by longtime New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., also reveals that Clinton chose not to read a critical National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs days before casting her controversial 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war.
The book portrays Clinton as a politically savvy manipulator who is, in turn, manipulated by an even savvier manipulator named Bill Clinton.
"The news here is there is no news," said Hillary Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, who claimed much of the account was "warmed-over" versions of previously released material.
Gerth and Van Natta's 400-page biography is timed to arrive in bookstores June 5 - the same day as Carl Bernstein's 650-page "A Woman in Charge."
Clinton's rapid-response media operation began issuing talking points questioning the veracity and newsworthiness of both books.
Internally, staffers have jokingly dubbed their blowback operation the "Van Gerthstein" team, a conflation of the three authors' names.
But the elan hides real concern among her supporters that the books might revive long-held views that she accepted her husband's infidelities as a trade-off for her own presidential ambitions. Bernstein's book, which he began in 1999, before Clinton won election to the Senate, is more of a soup-to-nuts biography, with new information about Hillary Clinton's 30-year struggle to cope with her husband's infidelities.
The Gerth-Van Natta biography is more sharply focused on her longtime role as her husband's political consigliere in the 1990s and her seven years in the Senate - particularly her controversial decision to vote for the Oct. 11, 2002, resolution approving the use of force in Iraq.
"Her insecurity about her public image, her knowledge that her nascent national security credentials might be perceived as insufficient by voters ... made it difficult to vote no," the authors wrote in a proof copy of the book obtained by Newsday.
Only six senators checked into a guarded conference room to read the top-secret 90-plus-page intelligence estimate.
In addition to Clinton, the five other current and former senators running for president also opted not to scrutinize the document.
But the other senators were able to dispatch staffers with top security clearances to read the report for them; at the time, no one in Clinton's office besides the senator herself had such clearances, the authors claim.
"Senator Clinton was briefed multiple times by several members of the administration on their intelligence regarding Iraq, which included the classified aspects of the NIE," responded her spokesman, Philippe Reines.
In one of the more controversial allegations, Gerth and Van Natta allege that Hillary Clinton told then White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta of a Clinton family plan to serve successive eight-year terms in the White House.
During a 1996 ride on Air Force One, Panetta said Clinton revealed the project "had begun in Arkansas with the goal of establishing a long-term change in where the Democratic Party was heading."
BTW, how's Vince doing these days?
BTW, how’s Vince doing these days?...................
Probably one of the few of the Clintonistas that actually possessed a conscience. That the circumstances of his death were not a concern for a populace more enraptured by “pain feeling” one-liners, bespeaks of the depth of the on-going American tragedy.
Exaggerate I do not!
her seven years in the SenateJust over six years, now, less when the book was written. Thanks SB.
Thanks for the ping!
Yes Ma’am!
Queen Jezebel a manipulator - definitely!
Queen Jezebel “savvy”?!??! “Underhanded” would be more apt!
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