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No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
In No One Left to Lie To, Christopher Hitchens portrays President Bill Clinton as one of the most ideologically skewed and morally negligent politicians of recent times. In a blistering polemic which shows that Clinton was at once philanderer and philistine, crooked and corrupt, Hitchens challenges perceptions - of liberals and conservatives alike - of this highly divisive figure.
With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right and argues that the president's personal transgressions were inseparable from his political corruption.
With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right and argues that the president's personal transgressions were inseparable from his political corruption.
150 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Christopher Hitchens
160 books7,333 followersChristopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books — the most famous being God Is Not Great — made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist."
The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.
Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...
Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist."
The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.
Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...
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April 10, 2017
Christopher Hitchens was not what you would call a team player. His refusal to be pinned down as aligning neatly to the Left or Right of the political spectrum is a source of repeated consternation for his supporters, many of whom still cannot reconcile their admiration of the man himself with his support of neoconservative policies like the Iraq War. He was a self-confessed contrarian, but more importantly he possessed an unwavering moral compass which compelled him (with seeming indifference to the personal consequences) to act on his convictions when others would remain silent.
No One Left to Lie To is a gloriously acerbic polemic that is leveled directly at a President remembered by most on the Left as "one of the good ones", and the book is likely to entirely disabuse the reader of any notions to that effect. Was Bill Clinton the worst president in America's history? Certainly one could locate better targets for that honour, but it is nonetheless clear that there was a sinister side to Clinton's character that has been largely ignored or actively silenced, ironically often by the same people who would ordinarily be opposed to exactly the kinds of wrongdoing of which he has been accused.
And that is the crux of Clinton's strategy of triangulation as detailed in this book. Put simply, triangulation is the practice of promising to the Left (which has the votes), while delivering to the Right (which has the money). The malignant genius of this approach is the way in which the duped supporters not only accept and rationalise the broken promises, but actively defend the politician when they deliver for their political opponents.
Once seen, the racket of triangulation is hard to unsee. This was the same template used by Obama eight years later, who ran for office on a platform of reform, only to deliver mediocre change in the form of a fundamentally corporatist healthcare bill, and a continuation of many of Bush's policies. Very little was given, apart from promises, to the people supported his run for office. But even so, Obama did at least deliver some incremental improvements. Clinton, on the other hand, actively worked against the wishes of his constituents in his degradation of Welfare, leaving the situation worse than when he took office.
This strategy that has been so effective has been remarkably difficult for the public at large to detect. But it could be argued that such repeated and consistent dishonesty has fostered the necessary conditions of deep cynicism and discontent that has enabled the recent success of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump - candidates who although they stand apart in policy, represent to the electorate a departure from the duplicitous politics of old. However misguided it may be to look toward someone like Trump as a paragon of honesty, the fact is that the voting public is finally realising what a dishonest politician looks like, and thus certainly Clinton bears some of the responsibility for the current course of events.
But I digress.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation in this book comes in the chapter provocatively titled, "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?", where Hitchens describes an unproved but very credible allegation of rape by Clinton against one Juanita Broaddrick. I repeat Juanita's account of the incident here verbatim, in all its nauseating glory:
Hitchens describes what happened next:
But Juanita continues:
The violence of the attack and the extreme callousness of its conclusion makes this perhaps the most striking and egregious of the examples described, but this is by no means an isolated incident. There are a number of accounts that are concordant in their details (for example many report lip-biting), and have been reported independently by a number of women. This pattern of callousness and lack of personal control is evident also in Clinton's official actions while President and Governor of Arkansas, for example in his handling of the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector and his involvement in the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. On these examples I will not elaborate, in the interest of keeping this review somewhat concise. But the short of all of this is that I absolutely won't be able to look at "Bubba" in the same forgiving light ever again.
I cannot write a review of this book in August of 2016 without making mention of the upcoming Presidential election, in which the American people (of which mercifully I am not part), are required to make the unenviable choice between Mrs Clinton (who is not herself without guilt), and an incompetent dangerous buffoon. While it is certainly possible to produce a list of not insignificant ways in which a Trump presidency might be superior to a Clinton one, it is clear that the only rational choice is to assiduously and with the urgency of a man fleeing his executioner, vote to avoid a Trump presidency at all costs. I would urge Americans to perform this act not with any relish or pride in the outcome, but with the bitter resolve of a person swallowing a particularly nasty, but necessary dose of medicine.
No One Left to Lie To is a gloriously acerbic polemic that is leveled directly at a President remembered by most on the Left as "one of the good ones", and the book is likely to entirely disabuse the reader of any notions to that effect. Was Bill Clinton the worst president in America's history? Certainly one could locate better targets for that honour, but it is nonetheless clear that there was a sinister side to Clinton's character that has been largely ignored or actively silenced, ironically often by the same people who would ordinarily be opposed to exactly the kinds of wrongdoing of which he has been accused.
And that is the crux of Clinton's strategy of triangulation as detailed in this book. Put simply, triangulation is the practice of promising to the Left (which has the votes), while delivering to the Right (which has the money). The malignant genius of this approach is the way in which the duped supporters not only accept and rationalise the broken promises, but actively defend the politician when they deliver for their political opponents.
Once seen, the racket of triangulation is hard to unsee. This was the same template used by Obama eight years later, who ran for office on a platform of reform, only to deliver mediocre change in the form of a fundamentally corporatist healthcare bill, and a continuation of many of Bush's policies. Very little was given, apart from promises, to the people supported his run for office. But even so, Obama did at least deliver some incremental improvements. Clinton, on the other hand, actively worked against the wishes of his constituents in his degradation of Welfare, leaving the situation worse than when he took office.
This strategy that has been so effective has been remarkably difficult for the public at large to detect. But it could be argued that such repeated and consistent dishonesty has fostered the necessary conditions of deep cynicism and discontent that has enabled the recent success of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump - candidates who although they stand apart in policy, represent to the electorate a departure from the duplicitous politics of old. However misguided it may be to look toward someone like Trump as a paragon of honesty, the fact is that the voting public is finally realising what a dishonest politician looks like, and thus certainly Clinton bears some of the responsibility for the current course of events.
But I digress.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation in this book comes in the chapter provocatively titled, "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?", where Hitchens describes an unproved but very credible allegation of rape by Clinton against one Juanita Broaddrick. I repeat Juanita's account of the incident here verbatim, in all its nauseating glory:
I had coffee sitting on a little table over there by the window. And it was a real pretty window view that looked down at the river. And he came around me and sort of put his arm over my shoulder to point to this little building. And he said that he was real interested, if he became governor, to restore that little building, and then all of a sudden, he turned me around and started kissing me... I first pushed him away... Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip... He starts to bite on my top lip, and I try to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened... It was a real panicky, panicky situation. And I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to - you know - to please stop. But that's when he would press down on my right shoulder and he would bite on my lip.
Hitchens describes what happened next:
Her skirt was torn at the waist, her pantyhose ripped at the crotch, and the [at that time] attorney general of Arkansas forced an entry.
But Juanita continues:
When everything was over with and he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says "You'd better get some ice on that." And he turned and went out the door.
The violence of the attack and the extreme callousness of its conclusion makes this perhaps the most striking and egregious of the examples described, but this is by no means an isolated incident. There are a number of accounts that are concordant in their details (for example many report lip-biting), and have been reported independently by a number of women. This pattern of callousness and lack of personal control is evident also in Clinton's official actions while President and Governor of Arkansas, for example in his handling of the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector and his involvement in the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. On these examples I will not elaborate, in the interest of keeping this review somewhat concise. But the short of all of this is that I absolutely won't be able to look at "Bubba" in the same forgiving light ever again.
I cannot write a review of this book in August of 2016 without making mention of the upcoming Presidential election, in which the American people (of which mercifully I am not part), are required to make the unenviable choice between Mrs Clinton (who is not herself without guilt), and an incompetent dangerous buffoon. While it is certainly possible to produce a list of not insignificant ways in which a Trump presidency might be superior to a Clinton one, it is clear that the only rational choice is to assiduously and with the urgency of a man fleeing his executioner, vote to avoid a Trump presidency at all costs. I would urge Americans to perform this act not with any relish or pride in the outcome, but with the bitter resolve of a person swallowing a particularly nasty, but necessary dose of medicine.
September 27, 2007
Read this before you vote for Hillary...
January 23, 2019
'Your heart on fire and your brain on ice ~ Vladimir Lenin
“Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal, the open mind against the credulous” - Christopher Hitchens.
THE BLURB
In No One Left to Lie To, Christopher Hitchens portrays President Bill Clinton as one of the most ideologically skewed and morally negligent politicians of recent times. In a blistering polemic which shows that Clinton was at once philanderer and philistine, crooked and corrupt, Hitchens challenges perceptions - of liberals and conservatives alike - of this highly divisive figure.
With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right and argues that the president's personal transgressions were inseparable from his political corruption.
To understand this author's book on Bill Clinton, one has to understand the angle he is coming from first.
He was a controversial journalist, initially left-wing, and a widely published author. He traveled the world reporting for publications such as The Nation, The New Statesman, The Daily Express, The Evening Standard,(Britain), The Atlantic, Vanity Fair(American) and various others. As a staff writer and editor at The New Statesman he fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan.
The author never wavered on fixing his devastating gaze on figures such as Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and the Clintons. His lasting legacy is probably his atheism.
His death in 2011 ended his reign as probably the most articulate and contraversial intellectual of his generation. "He was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar", wrote Vanity Fair where he was a contributing editor.. Smart and funny. He did not mind to disagree with anyone. He never took it personally. It never affected his friendships with people. It was once said that his daily intake of alcohol was enough to kill or stun the average mule. He was a literary bad-ass. He was known for taking some unpopular stands and if you hated him for that, he was just fine with it. In fact, he once remarked: "If you don't like what I say, or disagree, take a number, stand in line and kiss my ass." He was regarded as the most likable and incredibly nice guy, good-humored with a modern approach to everything. His followers regarded him as the most memorable iconoclast of our time.
He was born in the English middle class. His mother did everything to pay for his education in a much revered private Christian-based elite school, which he attended from the age of eight to eighteen. She apparently said to his father that if there was to be an upper class in this country, her son was going to be part of it. He attended Oxford (as contemporary of Bill Clinton), was a Marxist and leader of the revolutionary left. In the Seventies he started to work as a journalist at a left-wing publication.
However, everything changed after 9-11. In his opinion the radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience, which he later would define as 'Islamfascism'. Oscar Wilde's phrase, "the problem with socialism is that it wastes too much time on evening meetings", inspired Christopher to reconsider the cause he had chosen. The events of 9-11 had this British Trotskyite lost his faith in socialism. He ended his 20-year relationship with the The Nation magazine which shocked everyone around him. After that he supported the invasion of Irak and Afghanistan and loosely became a 'libertarian socialist'. He once admitted being Republican, but only because he was Antiroyalist. It was his reason for leaving Britain in 1981 to become an American citizen.
Hitchen, or Hitch, and 'The Hitchman', as he was known to his plethora of friends and supporters, became a highly sought-after speaker and orator all over the country. A one-man-band of rebellion and straight talk. Some people described his form of investigative journalism as direct and acerbic, although his lectures and speaking gigs were enthusiastically attended by thousands of people who just could not endure the lies and deceit any longer. It has gone on for too many years.
He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Bill Clinton a raging psycho, whose legacy, he said, would be one of a regime of nothingness punctuated by nastiness. The American Right was 'rather an unpolished crew, the sort of people who tore the country, calling for sexual abstinence among teenagers.' Dick Morris was 'a sleazy political consultant, ultra conservative, (who used to work for Jesse Helms), an unscrupulous money man, a bagman, and an occasional procurer of women for Bill Clinton, his only male friend.' Bill Clinton's pimp. Dick Morris coined the term Triangular which forms part of the title of this book.
He regarded Princess Diana as, first an foremost, a cult figure, and secondly 'a slow ranger, narcissistic, good-time girl with a very bad taste in men'. Mother Theresa was no saint, more like a fraud, a liar and a thief. (Read his book, The Missionary Position-Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, which he initially wanted to title "Sacred Cow.")
He also took on religion, as the 'despotism of the sky' in no uncertain terms. His book God Is Not Great - how religion poisons everything became an international bestseller. He regarded himself as a neo-atheist...Hitch became a crusader against 'clerical and theocratical bullying'. Religion, according to him, included 'nuclear-armed mullahs, as well as insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools.'
He encouraged atheist to a "genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry." Source : Bluejaysway.com
I want to throw in a small and humble comment here: Hitchen's description of religion corresponds nicely with the definition of Communism and Socialism, or even so-called Neosocialism. Quite an irony. At first they fight for the freedom of speech and then eventually withdrew it, often with tyrannical fervor. Many sociologists agree on the similarity between political Fascism, Religion and Communism. All three movements often require the followers to distinguish themselves by wearing a uniform, differentiating them from everyone else around them (the burka and white robes (Islam), yellowish-orange robes (Budha), black cassocks or long white robes (Catholic priests), the Jewish black robes and long beards, different uniforms, with red scarves by Communists, etc.
I wish I could ask Mr. Hitchens to comment on that. In fact, the urge to find global peace is a common goal in all three ideologies. It probably explains his passive aggressiveness towards all three ideologies, landing himself in a No Man's Land, throwing stones at all the followers of the three 'No-No's' in his book. His moral compass, of treating everyone(even Bill Clinton and a few others) with respect, as well as a deep gentlemanly compassion can probably be found in all of it.
Nevertheless, I am forever a huge admirer of Christopher Hitchens for the very same reasons as the thousands of others who mourn his passing. He made me laugh and challenged me to think and explore. He was straightforward, honest, extremely intelligent, and to the point. Kind, warm, humorous, witty, and deeply human. I just loved his ironic, sarcastic wit.
An excellent obituary(and short biography) to this author by the New York Times can be found here:
Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62 .
You can watch numerous videos of him on Youtube.
AND NOW ABOUT THE BOOK :-))
I read the twelfth edition. This book has gone places, for sure. It remained an international bestseller for many months.
Quotes from the introduction, written by historian Douglas Brinkley:
Needless to say, this is my kind of book. And yes, my kind of author. This is the kind of journalism I want to read. We all should insist on it.
“Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal, the open mind against the credulous” - Christopher Hitchens.
THE BLURB
In No One Left to Lie To, Christopher Hitchens portrays President Bill Clinton as one of the most ideologically skewed and morally negligent politicians of recent times. In a blistering polemic which shows that Clinton was at once philanderer and philistine, crooked and corrupt, Hitchens challenges perceptions - of liberals and conservatives alike - of this highly divisive figure.
With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right and argues that the president's personal transgressions were inseparable from his political corruption.
To understand this author's book on Bill Clinton, one has to understand the angle he is coming from first.
He was a controversial journalist, initially left-wing, and a widely published author. He traveled the world reporting for publications such as The Nation, The New Statesman, The Daily Express, The Evening Standard,(Britain), The Atlantic, Vanity Fair(American) and various others. As a staff writer and editor at The New Statesman he fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan.
The author never wavered on fixing his devastating gaze on figures such as Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and the Clintons. His lasting legacy is probably his atheism.
His death in 2011 ended his reign as probably the most articulate and contraversial intellectual of his generation. "He was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar", wrote Vanity Fair where he was a contributing editor.. Smart and funny. He did not mind to disagree with anyone. He never took it personally. It never affected his friendships with people. It was once said that his daily intake of alcohol was enough to kill or stun the average mule. He was a literary bad-ass. He was known for taking some unpopular stands and if you hated him for that, he was just fine with it. In fact, he once remarked: "If you don't like what I say, or disagree, take a number, stand in line and kiss my ass." He was regarded as the most likable and incredibly nice guy, good-humored with a modern approach to everything. His followers regarded him as the most memorable iconoclast of our time.
He was born in the English middle class. His mother did everything to pay for his education in a much revered private Christian-based elite school, which he attended from the age of eight to eighteen. She apparently said to his father that if there was to be an upper class in this country, her son was going to be part of it. He attended Oxford (as contemporary of Bill Clinton), was a Marxist and leader of the revolutionary left. In the Seventies he started to work as a journalist at a left-wing publication.
However, everything changed after 9-11. In his opinion the radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience, which he later would define as 'Islamfascism'. Oscar Wilde's phrase, "the problem with socialism is that it wastes too much time on evening meetings", inspired Christopher to reconsider the cause he had chosen. The events of 9-11 had this British Trotskyite lost his faith in socialism. He ended his 20-year relationship with the The Nation magazine which shocked everyone around him. After that he supported the invasion of Irak and Afghanistan and loosely became a 'libertarian socialist'. He once admitted being Republican, but only because he was Antiroyalist. It was his reason for leaving Britain in 1981 to become an American citizen.
Hitchen, or Hitch, and 'The Hitchman', as he was known to his plethora of friends and supporters, became a highly sought-after speaker and orator all over the country. A one-man-band of rebellion and straight talk. Some people described his form of investigative journalism as direct and acerbic, although his lectures and speaking gigs were enthusiastically attended by thousands of people who just could not endure the lies and deceit any longer. It has gone on for too many years.
He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Bill Clinton a raging psycho, whose legacy, he said, would be one of a regime of nothingness punctuated by nastiness. The American Right was 'rather an unpolished crew, the sort of people who tore the country, calling for sexual abstinence among teenagers.' Dick Morris was 'a sleazy political consultant, ultra conservative, (who used to work for Jesse Helms), an unscrupulous money man, a bagman, and an occasional procurer of women for Bill Clinton, his only male friend.' Bill Clinton's pimp. Dick Morris coined the term Triangular which forms part of the title of this book.
He regarded Princess Diana as, first an foremost, a cult figure, and secondly 'a slow ranger, narcissistic, good-time girl with a very bad taste in men'. Mother Theresa was no saint, more like a fraud, a liar and a thief. (Read his book, The Missionary Position-Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, which he initially wanted to title "Sacred Cow.")
He also took on religion, as the 'despotism of the sky' in no uncertain terms. His book God Is Not Great - how religion poisons everything became an international bestseller. He regarded himself as a neo-atheist...Hitch became a crusader against 'clerical and theocratical bullying'. Religion, according to him, included 'nuclear-armed mullahs, as well as insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools.'
He encouraged atheist to a "genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry." Source : Bluejaysway.com
I want to throw in a small and humble comment here: Hitchen's description of religion corresponds nicely with the definition of Communism and Socialism, or even so-called Neosocialism. Quite an irony. At first they fight for the freedom of speech and then eventually withdrew it, often with tyrannical fervor. Many sociologists agree on the similarity between political Fascism, Religion and Communism. All three movements often require the followers to distinguish themselves by wearing a uniform, differentiating them from everyone else around them (the burka and white robes (Islam), yellowish-orange robes (Budha), black cassocks or long white robes (Catholic priests), the Jewish black robes and long beards, different uniforms, with red scarves by Communists, etc.
I wish I could ask Mr. Hitchens to comment on that. In fact, the urge to find global peace is a common goal in all three ideologies. It probably explains his passive aggressiveness towards all three ideologies, landing himself in a No Man's Land, throwing stones at all the followers of the three 'No-No's' in his book. His moral compass, of treating everyone(even Bill Clinton and a few others) with respect, as well as a deep gentlemanly compassion can probably be found in all of it.
Nevertheless, I am forever a huge admirer of Christopher Hitchens for the very same reasons as the thousands of others who mourn his passing. He made me laugh and challenged me to think and explore. He was straightforward, honest, extremely intelligent, and to the point. Kind, warm, humorous, witty, and deeply human. I just loved his ironic, sarcastic wit.
An excellent obituary(and short biography) to this author by the New York Times can be found here:
Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62 .
You can watch numerous videos of him on Youtube.
AND NOW ABOUT THE BOOK :-))
I read the twelfth edition. This book has gone places, for sure. It remained an international bestseller for many months.
Quotes from the introduction, written by historian Douglas Brinkley:
Let’s be clear right off the bat: Christopher Hitchens was duty-bound to slay Washington, D.C., scoundrels. Somewhere around the time that the Warren Commission said there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the Johnson administration insisted there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, Hitchens made a pact with himself to be a principled avatar of subjective journalism. If a major politician dared to insult the intelligentsia’s sense of enlightened reason, he or she would have to contend with the crocodile-snapping wrath of Hitchens. So when five-term Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became U.S. president in 1993, full of “I didn’t inhale” denials, he was destined to encounter the bite. What Clinton couldn’t have expected was that Hitchens—in this clever and devastating polemic—would gnaw off a big chunk of his ass for the ages. For unlike most Clinton-era diatribes that reeked of partisan sniping of-the-moment, Hitchens managed to write a classic takedown of our forty-second president—on par with Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers (pathetic LBJ) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (poor Nixon)—with the prose durability of history. Or, more simply put, its bottle vintage holds up well.This outstanding, gutsy journalists, defying the current journalistic trend to rather cover up a lie than to stand up for the readers (and voters) - which is also addressed in the book, delivers an exposé in graceful, eloquent, tasteful prose, with an intellectual and philosophical touch. There's nothing cheesy or cheap about this book. Hitchens is no gossip-monger. He is a professional, courageous journalist on a quest to balance the scales of history. Hitchens can well be regarded as one of the last journalists to stand up and defend the readers and voters of the world against the spin-machines of ruthless politicians. He heard the voices of the working classes whose slogan till today is Taxation without representation. He was as popular with the Left as with the Right.
What No One Left to Lie To shares with the Mailer and Thompson titles is a wicked sense of humor, razorblade indictments, idiopathic anger, high élan, and a wheelbarrow full of indisputable facts. Hitchens proves to be a dangerous foe to Clinton precisely because he avoids the protest modus operandi of the antiwar 1960s. Instead of being unwashed and plastered in DayGlo, he embodies the refined English gentleman, swirling a scotch-and-Perrier (“the perfect delivery system”) in a leather armchair, utilizing the polished grammar of an Oxford don in dissent, passing judgment from history’s throne. In these chapters, the hubristic Hitchens dismantles the Clinton propaganda machine of the 1990s, like a veteran safecracker going click-back click-click-back click until he gets the goods. Detractors of Hitchens over the years have misguidedly tattooed him with the anarchistic “bomb-thrower” label. It’s overwrought. While it’s true that Hitchens unleashes his disdain for Clinton right out of the gate here, deriding him on Page One as a bird-dogging “crooked president,” the beauty of this deft polemic is that our avenging hero proceeds to prove the relative merits of this harsh prosecution.
Hemingway famously wrote that real writers have a built-in bullshit detector—no one has ever accused Hitchens of not reading faces. What goaded him the most was that Clinton, the so-called New Democrat, with the help of his Machiavellian-Svengali consultant Dick Morris, decided the way to hold political power was by making promises to the Left while delivering to the Right. This rotten strategy was called Triangulation. All Clinton gave a damn about, Hitchens maintains, was holding on to power. As a man of the Left, an English-American columnist and critic for The Nation and Vanity Fair, Hitchens wanted to be sympathetic to Clinton. His well-honed sense of ethics, however, made that impossible. He refused to be a Beltway liberal muted by the “moral and political blackmail” of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “eight years of reptilian rule.”
Clinton is for Hitchens emblematic of an official Washington overrun with lobbyists, Tammany-bribers, and bagmen of a thousand stripes. But Hitchens doesn’t merely knock Clinton down like most polemicists. Instead, he drives over him with an 18-wheel Peterbilt, shifts gears to reverse, and then flattens the reputation of the Arkansas “boy wonder” again and again. Anyone who gets misty-eyed when Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” the Clinton theme song, comes on the radio shouldn’t read this exposé.
Hitchens’s eternal scorn, which, since his death from esophageal cancer in 2011, is resounding louder than ever with a thunderously appreciative reading public. In the post–Cold War era, Hitchens was the polemicist who mattered most. He understood better than anyone that today’s news is tomorrow’s history.
Everyone knows the wit and wisdom of Dorothy Parker and Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Like these esteemed literary predecessors, Hitchens will be anthologized and read for years to come. Three versions of Clinton’s impeachment drama (maybe more to come) will remain essential: Clinton’s own My Life, Kenneth Starr’s Official Report of the Independent Counsel’s Investigation of the President, and Hitchens’s No One Left to Lie To. Hopefully Hitchens’s book will continue to be read in journalism and history classes, not for its nitty-gritty anti-Clinton invective and switchblade putdowns, but to remind politicians that there are still reporters out there who will expose your most sordid shenanigans with a shit-rain of honest ridicule. Hitchens salutes a few of them—Jamin Raskin, Marc Cooper, and Graydon Carter among them—in these pages...
Needless to say, this is my kind of book. And yes, my kind of author. This is the kind of journalism I want to read. We all should insist on it.
March 28, 2024
I’m a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens’ polemics. So why, even while missing Hitch’s voice, did I wait so long to read this one? Complicity. I was one of those on the Left defending Clinton in the late ‘90s. I got so caught up in scoring points against Clinton’s Right Wing enemies that I failed to pay proper attention to the man who didn’t deserve any Left Wing defense at all.
So why did I read it now? Trump. I’ve been contemplating how otherwise intelligent and ethical people bring themselves to support him. (We lie to ourselves if we pretend that only morons and racist back him.) How can decent people support this obviously, blatantly indecent man? Reading this book was a reminder of how this happens. Evidence proved beyond a doubt that Clinton was a serial abuser of women, and very likely a rapist, yet top feminist defended him while attacking his victims. He was seriously lauded as “the first black president” while he was callously destroying the safety net depended on by so many disadvantaged communities of color. We knew this, or we could have, should have had we honestly opened our eyes. But most of us, myself included, buried our heads and played along. Complicit.
Women who told the truth were accused at best of trying to lure a sitting president into a perjury trap, as if it were necessary to trick Clinton into telling a lie.
Now before anyone gets their panties in a twist, I’m not suggesting that there is anything like a one to one comparison between Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. Trump stands alone, several levels of magnitude worse than Clinton or any other politicians in our history. (Though Clinton may almost equal him in mendacity.) But that’s not really the point when examining why decent people knowingly allow themselves to defend horrible politicians and the atrocities they commit. Point is, those on the Right at least got something for the sacrifice of their integrity. Trump gave them ultra conservative judges and Supreme Court Justices. He gave them the repeal of Roe vs Wade. He gave them tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian boarder policy. He gave them a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. And what did the Left get for sacrificing its integrity for Bill Clinton? Hitchens reminds us:
When, during his 1992 presidential campaign Bill Clinton vowed to “End welfare as we know it” by moving people from welfare to work, he presumably did not have in mind the legislation that he signed into law in August of 1996. The original idea had been to smooth the passage from welfare to work with guaranteed health care, child care, job training, and a job paying enough to live on. The 1996 legislation contained none of these supports — no health care or child care for people coming off welfare, no job training, no assurance of a job paying a living wage, nor for that matter of a job at any wage. In effect, what was dubbed Welfare Reform merely ended the promise of help to the indigent and their children, which Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated more than sixty years before. That is indeed how many of us remember the betrayal of the poor that year…Mr. Clinton signed legislation that was more hasty, callous, short term and ill considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own.
Hitchens also quoted David Fromm, one of the more thoughtful commentators on the Right:
”Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain — accept and defend policies you hate (Welfare Reform, The Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses), and I’ll deliver you the executive branch of government. Again, since 1994, Clinton has survived, and even thrived, by deftly balancing between Right and Left. He has assuaged the Left by continually proposing bold new programs — the expansion of Medicare to 55 year olds, a national daycare program, the reversal of Welfare Reform, the hooking up to the internet of every classroom, and now, the socialization of the means of production via Social Security — and he has placated the Right by dropping everyone of these programs as soon as he proposed it. Clinton makes speeches, Rubin and Greenspan make policy. The Left gets words, the Right gets deeds, and everybody is content.”
And while Clinton sacrificed everything that the Left cared about on the alter of his own political power, the Left defended him with the passion of a broken and battered wife defending her abuser husband.
At all times Clinton’s retreat from egalitarian or even from progressive positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.
This is a powerful polemic. It exposes a truly despicable man. And it is a reminder to many of us that we were complicit. Some on the Left still would rather attack Hitchens for writing it than admit that. But before you do that, read it, and ask yourself what this man ever did to deserve your defense. Hitchens stated it well:
In the critical days of his impeachment struggle Mr. Clinton was often said to be worried sick about his place in history. That place, however, is already secure. He will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal.
So why did I read it now? Trump. I’ve been contemplating how otherwise intelligent and ethical people bring themselves to support him. (We lie to ourselves if we pretend that only morons and racist back him.) How can decent people support this obviously, blatantly indecent man? Reading this book was a reminder of how this happens. Evidence proved beyond a doubt that Clinton was a serial abuser of women, and very likely a rapist, yet top feminist defended him while attacking his victims. He was seriously lauded as “the first black president” while he was callously destroying the safety net depended on by so many disadvantaged communities of color. We knew this, or we could have, should have had we honestly opened our eyes. But most of us, myself included, buried our heads and played along. Complicit.
Women who told the truth were accused at best of trying to lure a sitting president into a perjury trap, as if it were necessary to trick Clinton into telling a lie.
Now before anyone gets their panties in a twist, I’m not suggesting that there is anything like a one to one comparison between Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. Trump stands alone, several levels of magnitude worse than Clinton or any other politicians in our history. (Though Clinton may almost equal him in mendacity.) But that’s not really the point when examining why decent people knowingly allow themselves to defend horrible politicians and the atrocities they commit. Point is, those on the Right at least got something for the sacrifice of their integrity. Trump gave them ultra conservative judges and Supreme Court Justices. He gave them the repeal of Roe vs Wade. He gave them tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian boarder policy. He gave them a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. And what did the Left get for sacrificing its integrity for Bill Clinton? Hitchens reminds us:
When, during his 1992 presidential campaign Bill Clinton vowed to “End welfare as we know it” by moving people from welfare to work, he presumably did not have in mind the legislation that he signed into law in August of 1996. The original idea had been to smooth the passage from welfare to work with guaranteed health care, child care, job training, and a job paying enough to live on. The 1996 legislation contained none of these supports — no health care or child care for people coming off welfare, no job training, no assurance of a job paying a living wage, nor for that matter of a job at any wage. In effect, what was dubbed Welfare Reform merely ended the promise of help to the indigent and their children, which Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated more than sixty years before. That is indeed how many of us remember the betrayal of the poor that year…Mr. Clinton signed legislation that was more hasty, callous, short term and ill considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own.
Hitchens also quoted David Fromm, one of the more thoughtful commentators on the Right:
”Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain — accept and defend policies you hate (Welfare Reform, The Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses), and I’ll deliver you the executive branch of government. Again, since 1994, Clinton has survived, and even thrived, by deftly balancing between Right and Left. He has assuaged the Left by continually proposing bold new programs — the expansion of Medicare to 55 year olds, a national daycare program, the reversal of Welfare Reform, the hooking up to the internet of every classroom, and now, the socialization of the means of production via Social Security — and he has placated the Right by dropping everyone of these programs as soon as he proposed it. Clinton makes speeches, Rubin and Greenspan make policy. The Left gets words, the Right gets deeds, and everybody is content.”
And while Clinton sacrificed everything that the Left cared about on the alter of his own political power, the Left defended him with the passion of a broken and battered wife defending her abuser husband.
At all times Clinton’s retreat from egalitarian or even from progressive positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.
This is a powerful polemic. It exposes a truly despicable man. And it is a reminder to many of us that we were complicit. Some on the Left still would rather attack Hitchens for writing it than admit that. But before you do that, read it, and ask yourself what this man ever did to deserve your defense. Hitchens stated it well:
In the critical days of his impeachment struggle Mr. Clinton was often said to be worried sick about his place in history. That place, however, is already secure. He will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal.
April 12, 2012
It is quite rare to see Bill Clinton's name appearing in any 'worst' President lists, certainly when compared with the likes of Nixon and W. This despite the impeachment proceedings brought against him over the Lewinsky affair. This is no doubt due largely to the period of economic prosperity associated with his Presidency.
Hitchens contention in this book is that Clinton was a serial liar, guilty of treating appallingly a great number of women. Clinton is accused of (amongst other things) rape, handing out government jobs to keep various women quiet and causing those who wouldn't accept such 'hush money' to be intimidated.
Some of the evidence marshalled by Hitchens could be said to be circumstantial, although it is telling that Clinton refused to deny the rape accusation and never, it seemed, contemplated suing Hitchens for the accusations in this book. The lack of a paper trail for such crimes is one thing. The long list of potential female accusers quite another.
That aside, to my mind the most disturbing accusation in the book is that Clinton personally oversaw the execution in 1992 of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired man accused of killing a police officer in Arkansas. Hitchens' contention is that Clinton saw this as a suitable way of avoiding any 'soft on crime' tag during the 1992 Presidential election and (unusually) broke off campaigning to return to Arkansas to ensure 'justice was done'. The diversion of headlines away from the ongoing Gennifer Flowers affair was, Hitchens contends, an additional motive for Clinton.
If half of the accusations in 'No One Left To Lie To' are true then Clinton would certainly have to be regarded as one of the most devious, oleaginous Presidents in history. Hitchens is on devastating form here, turning his pen against someone he believed to be utterly unfit to hold such high office. The book forms part of his 'holy trinity' of excoriating critiques that also included Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, all of which are highly recommended.
Hitchens contention in this book is that Clinton was a serial liar, guilty of treating appallingly a great number of women. Clinton is accused of (amongst other things) rape, handing out government jobs to keep various women quiet and causing those who wouldn't accept such 'hush money' to be intimidated.
Some of the evidence marshalled by Hitchens could be said to be circumstantial, although it is telling that Clinton refused to deny the rape accusation and never, it seemed, contemplated suing Hitchens for the accusations in this book. The lack of a paper trail for such crimes is one thing. The long list of potential female accusers quite another.
That aside, to my mind the most disturbing accusation in the book is that Clinton personally oversaw the execution in 1992 of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired man accused of killing a police officer in Arkansas. Hitchens' contention is that Clinton saw this as a suitable way of avoiding any 'soft on crime' tag during the 1992 Presidential election and (unusually) broke off campaigning to return to Arkansas to ensure 'justice was done'. The diversion of headlines away from the ongoing Gennifer Flowers affair was, Hitchens contends, an additional motive for Clinton.
If half of the accusations in 'No One Left To Lie To' are true then Clinton would certainly have to be regarded as one of the most devious, oleaginous Presidents in history. Hitchens is on devastating form here, turning his pen against someone he believed to be utterly unfit to hold such high office. The book forms part of his 'holy trinity' of excoriating critiques that also included Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, all of which are highly recommended.
January 12, 2020
I'm not old enough to remember Bill Clinton's presidency. I was 3 years old during the 2000 election! I think it's important to read about recent history, however, as that seems to be the history we often forget.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a harrowing book. Not only are Bill and Hillary Clinton picked apart by his examination of their professional and personal lives (which intertwined), but there is a lot said in this book that relates to the politics I am aware of, and have grown up in.
Firstly, as in the book, there is the "triangulation." Politicians like Tony Blair, David Cameron, and now (to an extent - there has not been quite enough time to exhibit a lot of proof for this) Boris Johnson, all, in their own ways, have used this method to encourage voters and remain in power. That is the biggest issue when campaigning from a centre-right or left position - you have to please both sides to an extent, but you will always come through on your promises to the side you feel more closely aligned to.
The second issue that is written about in great detail in this book which I think resonates strongly with the political landscape today are the lies. The only difference between Trump and Clinton in this regard would be that Trump is more careless with his lies, because the left is so weak right now that it doesn't matter. In the UK, lies have been printed on buses and in manifestos throughout the entire BREXIT phenomenon. Everyone is doing it. Everyone knows that everyone is doing it. Suddenly, lying has become something normal, rather than something people like Bill Clinton tried to keep quiet. If he was in power now, he would be glad that his lies wouldn't make a difference to his voters.
Pulling away from the politics and onto Hitchens' book itself, this was not my favourite of his works. The writing itself was not poor, but it was nowhere near to the quality of his later works, such as "God is Not Great." I put this down to two things: 1. the evidence to support his views are not quite as solid as he might have liked them to be; and 2. time. Every writer (we hope!) gets better over time, so the same can of course be said for Hitchens.
Overall, this is a good book and should be read by anyone who is interested in recent history and exploring how we got to the point we are at now. The obvious interest in the Clintons goes without saying!
Christopher Hitchens wrote a harrowing book. Not only are Bill and Hillary Clinton picked apart by his examination of their professional and personal lives (which intertwined), but there is a lot said in this book that relates to the politics I am aware of, and have grown up in.
Firstly, as in the book, there is the "triangulation." Politicians like Tony Blair, David Cameron, and now (to an extent - there has not been quite enough time to exhibit a lot of proof for this) Boris Johnson, all, in their own ways, have used this method to encourage voters and remain in power. That is the biggest issue when campaigning from a centre-right or left position - you have to please both sides to an extent, but you will always come through on your promises to the side you feel more closely aligned to.
The second issue that is written about in great detail in this book which I think resonates strongly with the political landscape today are the lies. The only difference between Trump and Clinton in this regard would be that Trump is more careless with his lies, because the left is so weak right now that it doesn't matter. In the UK, lies have been printed on buses and in manifestos throughout the entire BREXIT phenomenon. Everyone is doing it. Everyone knows that everyone is doing it. Suddenly, lying has become something normal, rather than something people like Bill Clinton tried to keep quiet. If he was in power now, he would be glad that his lies wouldn't make a difference to his voters.
Pulling away from the politics and onto Hitchens' book itself, this was not my favourite of his works. The writing itself was not poor, but it was nowhere near to the quality of his later works, such as "God is Not Great." I put this down to two things: 1. the evidence to support his views are not quite as solid as he might have liked them to be; and 2. time. Every writer (we hope!) gets better over time, so the same can of course be said for Hitchens.
Overall, this is a good book and should be read by anyone who is interested in recent history and exploring how we got to the point we are at now. The obvious interest in the Clintons goes without saying!
September 6, 2008
Bill Clinton took the highest office when I was 10, left when I was 18, and I always looked on him as the sly, cool dude Prez, who, in the glowing aura of Dubya's historical shitheap of a Presidency, I've many times said how "cool" it'd be to get him back. Suffice it to say, I don't anymore.
Christopher Hitchens is perhaps best known for his recent best-seller, God Is Not Great, which you may or may not be interested in, and which I haven't read, but he's merely a journalist & polemicist & skeptic at heart (not to mention a pro-war liberal & Englishman). So this book has all the signs of great journalism % skeptism and all of the trappings of a polemic - it pushes so far into the argument that the author thinks no one can disagree, based on his over-whelming evidence, that the average reader will want nothing more than to find any reason to disagree w/said author just to get a word in, which, sadly, is how I like to argue. So it's not for everyone, but in the world of us wannabe-wish-we-could-be-enlightened-despots, it should be.
With that said, all 150 pgs of this book will make any person with a brain hate the Clintons, but as Hitchens will tell you, any person with a brain should ever take any one person's Word for Truth. But I'll say that he sold me enough to make me lean from the side of (Bill) Clinton defender to (Both) Clinton(s) loather.
He deftly (if somewhat dryly at points - but hey, it's US political history - what else is new) strikes down the arguments of, "who cares what he does in his personal life, as long as he's doing his job as president." I won't spoil the treat of reading the book by listing them here, but they are wild to read. And you forget how every one of his liberal supporters felt the same way about him as I did, enough to blind themselves to what was really happening all around them - an 8-year version of his successor's $300 tax refunds, and at least 4 documented rapes/molestations. It made me happier that i voted for Nader in '00, and happier and happier that Hillary has been knocked out, and more and more terrified about November.
This book was written in 2000, and so it's tough to read all of this venom without trying to justify or defend it with the last 8 years as an example of "worse," and it's tough to remember some of the key players and timelines in stories that were commonplace at the time, but it's worth reading. The real core belief of any journalist/polemicist is that no one guilty should ever get off scott free, even if it seems too late.
Christopher Hitchens is perhaps best known for his recent best-seller, God Is Not Great, which you may or may not be interested in, and which I haven't read, but he's merely a journalist & polemicist & skeptic at heart (not to mention a pro-war liberal & Englishman). So this book has all the signs of great journalism % skeptism and all of the trappings of a polemic - it pushes so far into the argument that the author thinks no one can disagree, based on his over-whelming evidence, that the average reader will want nothing more than to find any reason to disagree w/said author just to get a word in, which, sadly, is how I like to argue. So it's not for everyone, but in the world of us wannabe-wish-we-could-be-enlightened-despots, it should be.
With that said, all 150 pgs of this book will make any person with a brain hate the Clintons, but as Hitchens will tell you, any person with a brain should ever take any one person's Word for Truth. But I'll say that he sold me enough to make me lean from the side of (Bill) Clinton defender to (Both) Clinton(s) loather.
He deftly (if somewhat dryly at points - but hey, it's US political history - what else is new) strikes down the arguments of, "who cares what he does in his personal life, as long as he's doing his job as president." I won't spoil the treat of reading the book by listing them here, but they are wild to read. And you forget how every one of his liberal supporters felt the same way about him as I did, enough to blind themselves to what was really happening all around them - an 8-year version of his successor's $300 tax refunds, and at least 4 documented rapes/molestations. It made me happier that i voted for Nader in '00, and happier and happier that Hillary has been knocked out, and more and more terrified about November.
This book was written in 2000, and so it's tough to read all of this venom without trying to justify or defend it with the last 8 years as an example of "worse," and it's tough to remember some of the key players and timelines in stories that were commonplace at the time, but it's worth reading. The real core belief of any journalist/polemicist is that no one guilty should ever get off scott free, even if it seems too late.
June 13, 2018
Interesting interview with the over-matched Charlie Rose when the book had just come out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrM0...
I belong to no party, but it turns out Bill and Hillary were just two peas in a pod....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77...
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/op...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrM0...
I belong to no party, but it turns out Bill and Hillary were just two peas in a pod....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77...
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/op...
June 15, 2011
In a fit of contrarianism--a trait which this author surely cannot hold against me--in the twilight of George W. Bush's eight years in the White House I elected to read Christopher Hitchens's polemical retrospective on the Clinton presidency. The author's preface does exactly what it should do, and cuts to the chase in the first two sentences: "This little book...is offered in the most cheerful and open polemical spirit, as an attack on a crooked president and a reactionary administration." I do not purpose to hold that book to any other standard, but like all works recorded for posterity, it must also be judged by the reader in the light of history, however recent.
Predating Hitchens's notorious break with the Left that accompanied his enthusiastic endorsement of the Iraq War, No One Left to Lie To offers an intriguing perspective on which continuities are present between the pre-9/11 Hitchens and the current incarnation. There are more than one might suppose. Hitchens did not suddenly lose his mind; his respect for some neoconservative pundits has a longer history than George W. Bush's presence on the world stage. Similarly, his contempt for the regime of Saddam Hussein was not more newfound than that of the Project for a New American Century.
What allies Hitchens with the neocons is a shared enemy; unfortunately the neocons, as befits their role as (wannabe) imperial administrators in the mold of the British and French before them, were and are concerned only about Iraq for strategic purposes, significantly but not exclusively because it "floats on a sea of oil", as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it circa 1 June 2003. By contrast, Hitchens's thirst for vengeance against Saddam Hussein seems motivated by a more human factor: personal contact with the survivors of the Halabja Massacre.
Hitchens has stern words for Clinton's handling of Iraq, not because he felt that the United States should not topple the Hussein regime, but because, in his view, Clinton used Iraq only as he used Sudan: as a distraction from the Lewinsky affair.
The biggest problem with this book in light of the past eight years of history is not that the author's case against Clinton isn't a strong one. No, Hitchens provides the meat behind the popularly mouthed slogan that Clinton "was the best Republican president since Lincoln". Bill Clinton's signatures on the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and a fumbling of universal health care so profound that it knocked the issue out of political reach for a decade, are achievements Ronald Reagan could have been proud of, had the Gipper actually managed them. While Hitchens lays out a case against Clinton's character and judgment, my inference is that the root of the Hitchens's wrath is Clinton's political charlatanism. What seems to enrage the author is not merely that he finds Clinton's ethics and political calculus gravely wanting, but that Clinton did not even possess the saving grace of enacting policies that bettered the lives of those who do not inhabit the top decile (or should I say percentile?) of the income distribution.
"[Bill Clinton:] will also be remembered as a man who offered a groaning board of incentives for the rich and draconian admonitions to the poor." (p. 59)
No proper Democrat, this boy from Hope, Arkansas. Hitchens quotes with approval arch-neoconservative pundit (and later Bush speechwriter) David Frum:
"Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain: Accept and defend policies you hate (welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses) and I'll deliver you the executive branch of government...Again since 1994, Clinton has survived and even thrived by deftly balancing between right and left. He has assuaged the Left by continually proposing bold new programs--the expansion of Medicare to 55 year-olds, a national day-care program, the reversal of welfare reform, the hooking up to the Internet of every classroom, and now the socialization of the means of production via Social Security. And he has placated the Right by dropping every one of these programs as soon as he proposed it. Clinton makes speeches, Rubin and Greenspan make policy; the Left gets words, the Right gets deeds; and everybody is content." (p. 23)
I confess that I would not have credited David Frum, purported coiner of the Manichean "Axis of Evil" phrase, with this sort of insight. We must recall, however, that Frum was writing in the Weekly Standard, the house organ of the neoconservative movement, nearly ten years ago. More significantly, the impeachment (a farce to Hitchens as much as to his liberal friends, albeit for different reasons) was safely in the past, and Clinton categorizable as yet another damned Democrat who got away. The fare peddled by the movement elite to its unwashed masses was carefully pre-digested into a paste tarring Clinton as a radical liberal, a moral crime surely as reprehensible as sexual harassment in the workplace (if not yet an impeachable offense). As those same masses collectively void their bowels at the prospect of a black president, you can find the traditional media with pooper-scoopers brandished, ready to serve that paste yet again to its panicky, voracious audience. (If pre-digested characterizations posed no barrier to their consumption, why should re-digested ones?) Witness Carol D. Leonnig writing in the Washington Post of 2 January 2009:
"To some staunch conservatives watching President Bush relinquish the reins of power to President-elect Barack Obama, a few too many ardent liberals are now crashing the gates.
Some well-known Democratic activists are advising Obama on how to steer federal agencies, including a few whom conservative Republicans fought hard to keep out of power in the Clinton administration. They include Roberta Achtenberg, a gay activist whose confirmation as an assistant housing secretary was famously held up by then-Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.), and Bill Lann Lee, who was hotly opposed by foes of affirmative action and temporarily blocked from the government's top civil rights job.
Conservatives fear that some of these Obama transition advisers are too far left on the political spectrum and are a sign of radical policies to come."
If overturning both houses of Congress was not an indicator that policy in this country should take a left turn, then surely the capture of the White House and the further increase of Democratic Congressional margins represents an electoral mandate that we all assiduously follow Barry Goldwater's conscience. (To their credit, the Democratic majority in Congress anticipated the concerns covered by Ms. Leonnig by proving that they had their fingers firmly on Jesse Helms's still-dead pulse, and implemented as few liberal policy objectives as they possibly could.)
Read this book, then, and consider Hitchens's case against Bill Clinton.
Predating Hitchens's notorious break with the Left that accompanied his enthusiastic endorsement of the Iraq War, No One Left to Lie To offers an intriguing perspective on which continuities are present between the pre-9/11 Hitchens and the current incarnation. There are more than one might suppose. Hitchens did not suddenly lose his mind; his respect for some neoconservative pundits has a longer history than George W. Bush's presence on the world stage. Similarly, his contempt for the regime of Saddam Hussein was not more newfound than that of the Project for a New American Century.
What allies Hitchens with the neocons is a shared enemy; unfortunately the neocons, as befits their role as (wannabe) imperial administrators in the mold of the British and French before them, were and are concerned only about Iraq for strategic purposes, significantly but not exclusively because it "floats on a sea of oil", as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it circa 1 June 2003. By contrast, Hitchens's thirst for vengeance against Saddam Hussein seems motivated by a more human factor: personal contact with the survivors of the Halabja Massacre.
Hitchens has stern words for Clinton's handling of Iraq, not because he felt that the United States should not topple the Hussein regime, but because, in his view, Clinton used Iraq only as he used Sudan: as a distraction from the Lewinsky affair.
The biggest problem with this book in light of the past eight years of history is not that the author's case against Clinton isn't a strong one. No, Hitchens provides the meat behind the popularly mouthed slogan that Clinton "was the best Republican president since Lincoln". Bill Clinton's signatures on the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and a fumbling of universal health care so profound that it knocked the issue out of political reach for a decade, are achievements Ronald Reagan could have been proud of, had the Gipper actually managed them. While Hitchens lays out a case against Clinton's character and judgment, my inference is that the root of the Hitchens's wrath is Clinton's political charlatanism. What seems to enrage the author is not merely that he finds Clinton's ethics and political calculus gravely wanting, but that Clinton did not even possess the saving grace of enacting policies that bettered the lives of those who do not inhabit the top decile (or should I say percentile?) of the income distribution.
"[Bill Clinton:] will also be remembered as a man who offered a groaning board of incentives for the rich and draconian admonitions to the poor." (p. 59)
No proper Democrat, this boy from Hope, Arkansas. Hitchens quotes with approval arch-neoconservative pundit (and later Bush speechwriter) David Frum:
"Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain: Accept and defend policies you hate (welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses) and I'll deliver you the executive branch of government...Again since 1994, Clinton has survived and even thrived by deftly balancing between right and left. He has assuaged the Left by continually proposing bold new programs--the expansion of Medicare to 55 year-olds, a national day-care program, the reversal of welfare reform, the hooking up to the Internet of every classroom, and now the socialization of the means of production via Social Security. And he has placated the Right by dropping every one of these programs as soon as he proposed it. Clinton makes speeches, Rubin and Greenspan make policy; the Left gets words, the Right gets deeds; and everybody is content." (p. 23)
I confess that I would not have credited David Frum, purported coiner of the Manichean "Axis of Evil" phrase, with this sort of insight. We must recall, however, that Frum was writing in the Weekly Standard, the house organ of the neoconservative movement, nearly ten years ago. More significantly, the impeachment (a farce to Hitchens as much as to his liberal friends, albeit for different reasons) was safely in the past, and Clinton categorizable as yet another damned Democrat who got away. The fare peddled by the movement elite to its unwashed masses was carefully pre-digested into a paste tarring Clinton as a radical liberal, a moral crime surely as reprehensible as sexual harassment in the workplace (if not yet an impeachable offense). As those same masses collectively void their bowels at the prospect of a black president, you can find the traditional media with pooper-scoopers brandished, ready to serve that paste yet again to its panicky, voracious audience. (If pre-digested characterizations posed no barrier to their consumption, why should re-digested ones?) Witness Carol D. Leonnig writing in the Washington Post of 2 January 2009:
"To some staunch conservatives watching President Bush relinquish the reins of power to President-elect Barack Obama, a few too many ardent liberals are now crashing the gates.
Some well-known Democratic activists are advising Obama on how to steer federal agencies, including a few whom conservative Republicans fought hard to keep out of power in the Clinton administration. They include Roberta Achtenberg, a gay activist whose confirmation as an assistant housing secretary was famously held up by then-Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.), and Bill Lann Lee, who was hotly opposed by foes of affirmative action and temporarily blocked from the government's top civil rights job.
Conservatives fear that some of these Obama transition advisers are too far left on the political spectrum and are a sign of radical policies to come."
If overturning both houses of Congress was not an indicator that policy in this country should take a left turn, then surely the capture of the White House and the further increase of Democratic Congressional margins represents an electoral mandate that we all assiduously follow Barry Goldwater's conscience. (To their credit, the Democratic majority in Congress anticipated the concerns covered by Ms. Leonnig by proving that they had their fingers firmly on Jesse Helms's still-dead pulse, and implemented as few liberal policy objectives as they possibly could.)
Read this book, then, and consider Hitchens's case against Bill Clinton.
January 5, 2021
The late Christopher Hitchens was irreverent, gifted, iconoclastic and brave. No target too big, no challenge too great. Anyone who can take aim at Kissinger, Mother Theresa, Radical Islamists and who would volunteer to stand alongside and take a bullet for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was handed down by Ayatollah Khomeini, well, he either has a top defamation attorney on retainer, owns a state of the art home security system or simply has no fears. So it is not surprising he takes on Bilary in this entertaining, savaging tome. The greatest fear any public figure can have is a Hitchens' profile. Start with the title ... No One Left to Lie To ... this is not Hitchens' trash talk but an actual quote from a Chicago Democrat who noted that Clinton had lied to a federal grand jury, a civil court, the Supreme Court, Congress, his cabinet and the American people. No one left to lie to. Hitchens occasionally slips off course, dispensing erudite highbrow quips and foreign phrases. His major flaw may be that he is a bit too educated, probably much more than most of his readers. Other folks from the Anti-Clinton camp dish out the dirt with dubious tidbits but Hitchens destroys with the sting of his overpowering invective. Not even a slick sermonizer like Bubba could have comebacks for these putdowns. He uncovers some very unsettling evidence of Clinton's betrayals and transgressions. Plus Bill and Hil come across as a very mean, spiteful couple. To the "forget the personal stuff he did a lot of good for the country" argument, Hitchens takes Clinton apart on the character and integrity issues. Using the Wag the Dog parallel he presents a strong case that Clinton's pre-emptive bombings of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, a Pakistan outpost and Baghdad with no consultation of the UN and his own Joint Chiefs were intended to distract national attention from the Lewinsky affair and his own impeachment proceedings. The case of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black prison inmate that Clinton summarily executed in the middle of his first Presidential campaign (allegedly to distract attention from the Gennifer Flowers scandal) is especially troubling. I forgot that Clinton had once crashed a Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition rally during the first campaign to publicly denounce Sister Soulja for her rap lyrics. I guess she hadn't kicked into the campaign or accepted a high priced invitation to stay in the Lincoln bedroom yet. Right or Left, you should read this book to remind yourself just how sleazy American politics can be. And quite a few zingers land on the other side of the aisle with barbs at the likes of Jesse Helms and Dick Morris. RIP Hitch ...
October 21, 2015
Hitchens turns his withering gaze to the Clintons in the phenomenal "No One Left To Lie To."
This book is perhaps best summed up in the words of Louis Menand in the New York Times Magazine when he wrote;
"You don't buy Christopher Hitchens's book because you want to find out whether Bill Clinton is really as terrible a liar as some people say he is. You buy it because you know he is a terrible liar, and the invitation to have a pungent fellow like Hitchens confirm every prejudice you ever had on the subject, plus a few you might not even have known you had, is an invitation you cannot resist."
I've long shared Hitchens's view that Bill Clinton's tenure as President marked the decline of liberalism and the Democratic Party's submergence into a slightly more moderate wing of the Republican Party. I find it remarkable that Bill Clinton was then, and is still today, held up as some kind of "great" president by anyone... least of all fellow liberals. Even more, as an example of democratic, or indeed, any kind of ethical or moral principles at all. How is it possible that one can be in control of the facts and still think this way? Clinton wasn't a bad president because he had (many) affairs- this is an off cited misnomer by Clintonites designed to denigrate Clinton's opposition- he was a bad president most of all, for my money, because he committed war crimes. Bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to distract the public away from his domestic problems is a remarkably reptilian undertaking, and Hitchens illustrates this in his brilliantly apt refrain that this is just one of many instances in which Clinton opted for death in order to distract from sex.
Of course, if unwarranted deaths and bombings don't move you, there's also his verified rape of, at least, 2 women during the time he was governor and campaigning for governor. Or the numerous financial and money laundering scandals stemming from Clinton Inc.
Reading Hitchens is never out of fashion nor untimely, particularly the year prior to a general election in which Hillary Clinton will (presumably) waltz all but uncontested to the Democratic Nomination. And on the former First Lady Hitchens predictably doesn't hold back.
Mrs. Clinton "is a tyrant and a bully when she can dare to be, and an ingratiating populist when that will serve... like him (Bill) she is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations."
For no other reason than to educate yourself against the inevitable scourge of sycophantic Hillary posturing by your "liberal" friends and the news media in the run up to 2016, you owe it to yourself to this read this book, as always a scorching indictment of a societal untouchable by the one and only Christopher Hitchens. I sure do miss the fellow.
This book is perhaps best summed up in the words of Louis Menand in the New York Times Magazine when he wrote;
"You don't buy Christopher Hitchens's book because you want to find out whether Bill Clinton is really as terrible a liar as some people say he is. You buy it because you know he is a terrible liar, and the invitation to have a pungent fellow like Hitchens confirm every prejudice you ever had on the subject, plus a few you might not even have known you had, is an invitation you cannot resist."
I've long shared Hitchens's view that Bill Clinton's tenure as President marked the decline of liberalism and the Democratic Party's submergence into a slightly more moderate wing of the Republican Party. I find it remarkable that Bill Clinton was then, and is still today, held up as some kind of "great" president by anyone... least of all fellow liberals. Even more, as an example of democratic, or indeed, any kind of ethical or moral principles at all. How is it possible that one can be in control of the facts and still think this way? Clinton wasn't a bad president because he had (many) affairs- this is an off cited misnomer by Clintonites designed to denigrate Clinton's opposition- he was a bad president most of all, for my money, because he committed war crimes. Bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to distract the public away from his domestic problems is a remarkably reptilian undertaking, and Hitchens illustrates this in his brilliantly apt refrain that this is just one of many instances in which Clinton opted for death in order to distract from sex.
Of course, if unwarranted deaths and bombings don't move you, there's also his verified rape of, at least, 2 women during the time he was governor and campaigning for governor. Or the numerous financial and money laundering scandals stemming from Clinton Inc.
Reading Hitchens is never out of fashion nor untimely, particularly the year prior to a general election in which Hillary Clinton will (presumably) waltz all but uncontested to the Democratic Nomination. And on the former First Lady Hitchens predictably doesn't hold back.
Mrs. Clinton "is a tyrant and a bully when she can dare to be, and an ingratiating populist when that will serve... like him (Bill) she is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations."
For no other reason than to educate yourself against the inevitable scourge of sycophantic Hillary posturing by your "liberal" friends and the news media in the run up to 2016, you owe it to yourself to this read this book, as always a scorching indictment of a societal untouchable by the one and only Christopher Hitchens. I sure do miss the fellow.
September 1, 2015
Given the title and tagline, a legitimate question is "Why read this book?" Is it merely provocative? A work to be shared by the community of Clinton haters? Come for the Clinton bashing, stay for the wonderful and witty prose. Is there any journalistic value to reading this book as the other half of the "Worst Family" is running for president?
My opinion on Bill Clinton prior to reading this book was consistent with the party line/myth: up from poverty, extremely intelligent, battled a hostile congress who was out to get him, impeached over a private matter, led the country at a time of prosperity, cared about the poor and was also a scumbag to some women.
After reading Hitchens' extensively researched book I am convinced that the party line needs to change.
The title comes from a speech by the Majority Council of the House Judiciary Committee David Schippers. He stated:
"The President, then, has lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to his Cabinet, he lied to his top aides, and now he's lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There's no one left to lie to."
Hitchens writes: "Just as the necessary qualification of a good liar is a good memory, so the essential equipment of a would-be lie detector is a good timeline, and a decent archive."
Hitchens has both. He distills American politics to "the manipulation of populism by elitism." Clinton accomplished this manipulation with the help of Dick Morris, who came up with "triangulation". Clinton can call for welfare reform---then sign legislation that was "more hasty, callous, short -term, and ill-considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own. He thus made sure he robbed them of an electoral issue, and gained new access to the very donors who customarily sent money to the other party." Clinton gains Democratic talking points while adopting Republican policy and gaining money and power.
Clinton's behavior toward women is also examined. There is a well documented record of Clinton harrassing, in at least one case raping, and then employing a goon squad to publicly discredit and intimidate the victims. Hitchens describes a moment during a town hall meeting. Al Gore is sitting Vice-President and running for president. An audience member asked about Juanita Broderick's claim that she was raped by the president, and if that changed Gore's opinion of Clinton and if he (Gore) believed the claim. Hitchens provides the transcript, and then comments:
"But all of this is paltry detail when set against the one arresting, flabbergasting, inescapable realization. For the first time in American history, a sitting Vice President has been asked whether or not there is a rapist in the Oval Office. A Vice President with "access" to boot, and a likely nominee for the same high position. A Vice President who has described the incumbent as a close friend. And he replies, at inhuman length, that he doesn't really know!"
Given Clinton's long pattern of dishonesty and sexual harassment and misconduct, the Lewinsky affair cannot be viewed as a private, isolated incident that only concerned Clinton's immediate family. Instead it is one episode of misbehavior that is entirely representative of the president's behavior...he just happened to be caught.
The final chapter centers on Hillary's run for NY Senator. After describing several of Hillary's own lies Hitchens comments: "Only those who are totally habituated to falsehood will so easily and naturally lie when the truth would have done just as well."
In conclusion, well-argued and well-researched polemics by independent journalists such as Mr. Hitchens are essential to the Democratic ideal, however unpleasant. The happy myth of a compassionate aw-shucks Clinton who comically can't stay away from fast food and women has the simplicity of a sitcom character....the truth of a conniving, methodical politician whose every move is calculated to provide maximal political and financial benefit, and who has a well documented history of harassing women, is not pleasant.
As we look forward to a Hillary Clinton show-down with Jeb Bush for president a follow-up polemic could sadly be titled "No one left to vote for"
My opinion on Bill Clinton prior to reading this book was consistent with the party line/myth: up from poverty, extremely intelligent, battled a hostile congress who was out to get him, impeached over a private matter, led the country at a time of prosperity, cared about the poor and was also a scumbag to some women.
After reading Hitchens' extensively researched book I am convinced that the party line needs to change.
The title comes from a speech by the Majority Council of the House Judiciary Committee David Schippers. He stated:
"The President, then, has lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to his Cabinet, he lied to his top aides, and now he's lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There's no one left to lie to."
Hitchens writes: "Just as the necessary qualification of a good liar is a good memory, so the essential equipment of a would-be lie detector is a good timeline, and a decent archive."
Hitchens has both. He distills American politics to "the manipulation of populism by elitism." Clinton accomplished this manipulation with the help of Dick Morris, who came up with "triangulation". Clinton can call for welfare reform---then sign legislation that was "more hasty, callous, short -term, and ill-considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own. He thus made sure he robbed them of an electoral issue, and gained new access to the very donors who customarily sent money to the other party." Clinton gains Democratic talking points while adopting Republican policy and gaining money and power.
Clinton's behavior toward women is also examined. There is a well documented record of Clinton harrassing, in at least one case raping, and then employing a goon squad to publicly discredit and intimidate the victims. Hitchens describes a moment during a town hall meeting. Al Gore is sitting Vice-President and running for president. An audience member asked about Juanita Broderick's claim that she was raped by the president, and if that changed Gore's opinion of Clinton and if he (Gore) believed the claim. Hitchens provides the transcript, and then comments:
"But all of this is paltry detail when set against the one arresting, flabbergasting, inescapable realization. For the first time in American history, a sitting Vice President has been asked whether or not there is a rapist in the Oval Office. A Vice President with "access" to boot, and a likely nominee for the same high position. A Vice President who has described the incumbent as a close friend. And he replies, at inhuman length, that he doesn't really know!"
Given Clinton's long pattern of dishonesty and sexual harassment and misconduct, the Lewinsky affair cannot be viewed as a private, isolated incident that only concerned Clinton's immediate family. Instead it is one episode of misbehavior that is entirely representative of the president's behavior...he just happened to be caught.
The final chapter centers on Hillary's run for NY Senator. After describing several of Hillary's own lies Hitchens comments: "Only those who are totally habituated to falsehood will so easily and naturally lie when the truth would have done just as well."
In conclusion, well-argued and well-researched polemics by independent journalists such as Mr. Hitchens are essential to the Democratic ideal, however unpleasant. The happy myth of a compassionate aw-shucks Clinton who comically can't stay away from fast food and women has the simplicity of a sitcom character....the truth of a conniving, methodical politician whose every move is calculated to provide maximal political and financial benefit, and who has a well documented history of harassing women, is not pleasant.
As we look forward to a Hillary Clinton show-down with Jeb Bush for president a follow-up polemic could sadly be titled "No one left to vote for"
April 23, 2012
This might be the first book I've read knowing there was an agenda behind it (I tend towards straight history). But since it was written by Hitchens and I've read quite a few books about Clinton, it seemed appropriate to "round out the knowledge" so to speak. Plus, Hitchens, of all writers, is above all a trustworthy narrator. The book obviously takes aim at the Clintons with evidence both real and circumstantial but Hitchens always admits as much. And that typical Hitchens humor is found in great doses throughout.
June 18, 2023
I read this book because I was charmed by this president while he was in office. It’s difficult to understand in retrospect. This president did more damage to the poor by introducing neoliberalistic policies such as privatizing the prison system and cutting aid than any other since Reagan. On top of it, he was a serial philanderer and destroyed the life and reputation of Monica Lewinsky. She was barely more than a child and he took advantage. I have no idea how I could have been so hoodwinked, despite my age. Clinton and Trump have A LOT in common, even if one of them isn’t orange. Okay, so Clinton also did not try to stage a coup, but still. They both belong to the same category of despicable men with too much power and no morals.
February 13, 2016
Bill Clinton understood, as Huey Long did before him, that “the essence of American politics…when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.” In this short, readably dense volume written at the end of the Clinton administration, Hitchens lays out the case of how the American public was blinded and manipulated to buy a myth. Unfortunately, Hitchens is no longer with us. I’m sure he would have recognized a reprise of sorts in Hillary Clinton’s current campaign for the presidency.
The core of Clintonian politics is the strategy of triangulation in which “the Left...swallows the soft promises of Clinton and the Right...demands, and gets, hard promises.” The cynical mishandling and ultimate demise of health care reform and the pledge to “end welfare as we know it” are the two most prominent examples Hitchens chooses to highlight. While dangling universal coverage and expanded benefits before the American people that would be taken away in the closing stages of the bill’s passage, Hillary Clinton worked in secret to construct a quasi-monopoly among the big four insurers that eventually succumbed to the political pressure. In the rise of HMOs in the aftermath and the failure to resurrect the issue during the rest of presidency, they actually left the American people worse off and delayed any reform for more than 15 years.
Clinton’s deal to reform welfare ended up slashing the social safety net for poor persons and created even deeper, longer term poverty. As Hitchens observes, Clinton “will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal.”
Another disturbing trend was previewed in the election of 1992 when Clinton returned to Arkansas to allow the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a severely mentally disabled man who saved the dessert from his last meal “for later.” This episode came during the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal, “mark[ing] the first of many times that Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex.” We would see it again many times, the most egregious of which was the bombing of a factory that supplied 60% of Sudan’s pharmaceuticals. Executive obfuscation of the facts falsely characterized the factory as a bomb-making facility. But, to Clinton’s advantage, it distracted the public briefly from the Lewinsky affair and raised his poll numbers.
Sadly the politics of triangulation are the core of the current Hillary Clinton campaign. So in 2016 we may have the choice between a neo-fascist and an unprincipled, faux progressive whose experience is more akin to Forrest Gump’s ability to be around the action rather than an instrumental force of ethical reform. And we don't have Hitchens around to deftly describe the tragedy that may be before us.
The core of Clintonian politics is the strategy of triangulation in which “the Left...swallows the soft promises of Clinton and the Right...demands, and gets, hard promises.” The cynical mishandling and ultimate demise of health care reform and the pledge to “end welfare as we know it” are the two most prominent examples Hitchens chooses to highlight. While dangling universal coverage and expanded benefits before the American people that would be taken away in the closing stages of the bill’s passage, Hillary Clinton worked in secret to construct a quasi-monopoly among the big four insurers that eventually succumbed to the political pressure. In the rise of HMOs in the aftermath and the failure to resurrect the issue during the rest of presidency, they actually left the American people worse off and delayed any reform for more than 15 years.
Clinton’s deal to reform welfare ended up slashing the social safety net for poor persons and created even deeper, longer term poverty. As Hitchens observes, Clinton “will be remembered as the man who used the rhetoric of the New Democrat to undo the New Deal.”
Another disturbing trend was previewed in the election of 1992 when Clinton returned to Arkansas to allow the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a severely mentally disabled man who saved the dessert from his last meal “for later.” This episode came during the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal, “mark[ing] the first of many times that Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex.” We would see it again many times, the most egregious of which was the bombing of a factory that supplied 60% of Sudan’s pharmaceuticals. Executive obfuscation of the facts falsely characterized the factory as a bomb-making facility. But, to Clinton’s advantage, it distracted the public briefly from the Lewinsky affair and raised his poll numbers.
Sadly the politics of triangulation are the core of the current Hillary Clinton campaign. So in 2016 we may have the choice between a neo-fascist and an unprincipled, faux progressive whose experience is more akin to Forrest Gump’s ability to be around the action rather than an instrumental force of ethical reform. And we don't have Hitchens around to deftly describe the tragedy that may be before us.
October 31, 2017
Read this one shortly after venting my frustrations with all things Clinton to a friend. No one does a take-down quite like Hitchens (for whom I have complicated feelings, possessing a brilliant mind that turned ugly in later years [partly due perhaps to years of alcoholism, but that's a separate issue]) but his vitriol gets the better of him on this one, often obscuring his very valid points about Clinton's war crimes, sex crimes, false promises, and disgusting tactics. Hitchens at certain points defends politicians against dissection of their character only to vigorously do so himself, and, let's be honest, Hitchens himself is hardly one to point the moral finger.
That being said, it was pretty satisfying, especially for someone like me who is just not sure she can stomach voting for Hillary.
That being said, it was pretty satisfying, especially for someone like me who is just not sure she can stomach voting for Hillary.
June 12, 2014
Essential Hitchslapping of a man (and now, a legacy) who liberals/the left have been far too quick to forgive. It's also required reading for anyone who would claim to be "Ready for Hillary" in 2016 (a prospect which Hitchens would be terrified about, and that I can't now exactly psych myself up for, either).
December 14, 2023
This is a masterful and elegant polemic from Hitch, one still quite applicable today in our tepid epoch of weak-kneed centrists and nodding neoliberals who accept the established prevarication that Uncle Joe is a man to fawn over. The question of Juanita Broaddrick remains open to this very day. As Hitch points out, Clinton has never overtly denied it. And that still holds true. But the oleaginous boot-licking that Beltway pundits continue to tender towards centrists and DINOs like the Clintons remains a repellent truth, one that demands the placing of towels in public halls -- if only to sap up the collective saliva. Clinton's alliance with Dick Morris and his signing of the Welfare Reform Act are enraging realities to be ignored by the Jonathan Chait-style fuckheads who know where their bread is buttered. This slim, trenchant, and wildly entertaining volume reminds us why it's important to ruffle feathers and to reduce the quacking pundits, all taking their cues from turncoats like David Axelrod, to the buffonery that represents their withering Weltanschaaung.
September 11, 2017
It's impossible not to read this short, angry shriek of a book without thinking of Christopher Hitchens' later career as the cheerleader for George Bush's Middle Eastern adventures. It's also hard to avoid concluding that his frothing Clinton-hatred provided a gateway to right wing insanity. Watching Hitch treat Clinton's August 1998 cruise missile strike in Sudan, which claimed a single civilian life, as a war crime worthy of Nuremberg is beyond disgusting given Hitchens' bloodthirsty advocacy of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps Hitchens finds it easier to decry the death of individuals than nations, though someone who extolled the virtue of endless war and gloated over Muslims pulverized by shrapnel bombs surely can't claim a surfeit of humanity.
In fairness, Hitchens does occasionally land valid attacks on Clinton's politics of triangulation, his selling out liberal Democrats for expedient gain and his sleazy personal behavior, whether in his perpetually boorish treatment of women (not that Mr. "Women Aren't Funny" has any standing on this subject) or executing a mentally handicapped black man to prove himself tough on crime. Such criticisms would be better-placed in a book that doesn't entertain, in all evident seriousness, the possibility that Clinton had an illegitimate mixed-race love child, that Hillary Clinton murdered Kathleen Willey's cat (a slur revived in our latest election), or that Ken Starr, rather than the Clintons, was victimized by insane conspiracy theories. The worst Hitchens can dredge up, on the last count, is one or two hysterical op eds, including one by Arthur Miller invoking his own play, The Crucible. This makes one shudder to contemplate how Hitchens would have handled Benghazi, Pizzagate or Huma Abedin.
When I was younger, I used to think Hitchens was smart, funny and cool. I'm increasingly convinced that he was none of the above, rather a sharp-tongued but fuzzy-headed contrarian who enjoyed acting angry and vicious whether or not he had cause to be. This book epitomizes that: instead of a convincing condemnation of Clintonian centrism, it's the kind of half-witted yet heinously pretentious diatribe you'd be more likely to find in unreadable meme form today.
In fairness, Hitchens does occasionally land valid attacks on Clinton's politics of triangulation, his selling out liberal Democrats for expedient gain and his sleazy personal behavior, whether in his perpetually boorish treatment of women (not that Mr. "Women Aren't Funny" has any standing on this subject) or executing a mentally handicapped black man to prove himself tough on crime. Such criticisms would be better-placed in a book that doesn't entertain, in all evident seriousness, the possibility that Clinton had an illegitimate mixed-race love child, that Hillary Clinton murdered Kathleen Willey's cat (a slur revived in our latest election), or that Ken Starr, rather than the Clintons, was victimized by insane conspiracy theories. The worst Hitchens can dredge up, on the last count, is one or two hysterical op eds, including one by Arthur Miller invoking his own play, The Crucible. This makes one shudder to contemplate how Hitchens would have handled Benghazi, Pizzagate or Huma Abedin.
When I was younger, I used to think Hitchens was smart, funny and cool. I'm increasingly convinced that he was none of the above, rather a sharp-tongued but fuzzy-headed contrarian who enjoyed acting angry and vicious whether or not he had cause to be. This book epitomizes that: instead of a convincing condemnation of Clintonian centrism, it's the kind of half-witted yet heinously pretentious diatribe you'd be more likely to find in unreadable meme form today.
October 3, 2023
I had heard about DOMA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and, as Hitchens rightly puts it the "moronic" policy of Three Strikes You're Out, none of which paint the Clinton administration in a favourable lighting. Nevertheless, I didn't think much about it all and maintained a vaguely positive sense about the Clinton Presidency as he was on the "right side" of the divide, and was buoyed by the success of America in its ascendancy in the newly monopolar geopolitics of the 1990s. Reading Hitchens' account, this started to change. From his Welfare "Reform" which was a disaster for the poor, his broken promises on healthcare (dismissing a single payer proposal certified by the Congressional Budget Office as the "most cost-effective on offer") to his bombing of Third-World countries for political distractions; his presidency wasn't the change it could have been, and was practically an extension of the Reagan-Bush years benefiting from success owed to greater world events.
This book amounts to a thorough indictment of Clinton's character and legacy. Hitchens' criticism is subtle at times but never loses its potency.
This book amounts to a thorough indictment of Clinton's character and legacy. Hitchens' criticism is subtle at times but never loses its potency.
June 13, 2008
I went to a luncheon presentation recently by the author and was quite taken by his perception and wit. Then I looked at the broad range of his published books. Having said some rather provocative comments about the president at lunch, I figured this book was a good place to start and I was not disappointed. Completed in the last days of the Clinton presidential administration and just before the start of Hillary's stint as N.Y. Senator, Hitchens catalogues Clinton abuses dating back well before the White House; pointed and effective prose while dealing with a deadly serious subject. This is not the work of some Neo-Con hitman. Hitchens, a columnist at Vanity Fair, attacks Clinton in no small way for destroying much of the New Deal legacy in a way Republicans never would or could.
Don't be surprised if the next few GoodReads entries are Hitchens' efforts. They are fast reads and I am now a fan.
Don't be surprised if the next few GoodReads entries are Hitchens' efforts. They are fast reads and I am now a fan.
May 2, 2012
a friend made me borrow this after we drank 6 beers each and watched a bunch of hilarious clips on youtube of hitchens being a dick.
very fun vitriol, though comes across as if it were written at the same speed at which i breezed through it. so heat-of-the-moment that it suffers now for lack of background and context on some of the people/events mentioned. had to do a bit of side-googling to refresh my memory on some things. and i am 100% sure counterexample upon counterexample were conveniently left out. it's just so small! still, packs a huge punch for such a lil text that's about 1/3 preface and afterward.
very fun vitriol, though comes across as if it were written at the same speed at which i breezed through it. so heat-of-the-moment that it suffers now for lack of background and context on some of the people/events mentioned. had to do a bit of side-googling to refresh my memory on some things. and i am 100% sure counterexample upon counterexample were conveniently left out. it's just so small! still, packs a huge punch for such a lil text that's about 1/3 preface and afterward.
July 22, 2013
A gripping diatribe; No One Left to Lie To scathingly and systematically delineates the malfeasances of Clinton & co., an administration as "crooked and reactionary" as it was fruitless and malicious.
November 29, 2015
Hitchens' work is probably the first I would give someone asking "why should I be concerned about another Clinton presidency?" or someone who espouses Clinton as one of our greatest Presidents. Presidents always see approval ratings rise after they leave office and the cognitive dissonance is amazing. Hitchens writes his book not as part of the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" but an aggrieved liberal living in Washington, D.C. and being friends with many connected to the Administration, with the added perspective of being a naturalized citizen and having traveled the world. Hitchens does not hide his friends, being critical of people like Sydney Blumenthal for being in the tank.
Hitchens' razor wit and ability to cut through the Clinton spin and get to the facts is amazing. As an atheist, it's not clear to me what basis he makes his moral judgments and outrage about the Clintons. If there is no ultimate authority of right or wrong, who is he to decide that their behavior is, in fact, unethical, and not just in his own opinion? I suppose one could say that he is writing given the laws we have on the books; those should therefore be enforced. To avoid confusion, I will therefore leave his atheism aside.
His commentary on the current political campaign is sorely missed. In 1999, Hitchens wrote that Hillary was a "a tyrant, a bully, and a lie." Judging from this Slate piece on Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign, Hitchens would be alarmed at how quickly HRC is able to either deflect or rewrite history and would be voting for Bernie Sanders. Hitch wrote this for Slate in 2008:
"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. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry."
Hitchens is critical of the media's inability of unwillingness to call HRC's lies for what they are. The media was slow to fact-check Hillary's claim to have being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was likely actually unknown to her mother as it was years before he had climbed Mt. Everest. But HRC's claim was, years later, still being used by the Clinton campaign to create a narrative about her character formation. Revelations of Pakistanis and others contributing to Hillary's US Senate campaign were also coming to light as Hitchen's book went to press.
Not long ago, I finished Clinton, Inc. and Clinton Cash both of which were published recently. I would rate Clinton, inc. a little lower after reading Hitchens' work as it mainly expands on the weaknesses and shenanigans that Hitchens describes. While the book has been ignored as right-wing screed, Hitch is much more critical of Bill Clinton than anything Fox News would dare to air. Clinton Cash would have Hitchens' approval for following the money and influence of the Clintons post-White House, and I recommend it as a follow-up to Hitch's work. He would surely be critical of both works as not going far enough.
Hitchens is most critical of Bill Clinton as a champion of liberal (ie: left) ideals but in reality a traitor to them. Hitchens fact-checks the Clinton campaign's claims of being champions of civil rights in Arkansas, noting that some of Clintons' claims about standing up to bigots as a child were highly unlikely. Arkansas was the only state left without a civil rights statute after Clinton left office, something he never proposed. It's well-remembered that Clinton got the Democratic nomination even after skipping New Hampshire, but less-remembered why. He had fallen in the polls after the Gennifer Flowers revelations and flew back to Arkansas to sign off on the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, an African-American convict who was brain-damaged due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hitchens notes that while Clinton is remembered by some as the "first black President," he "played the race card both ways" in his "Southern strategy" to win the Democratic nomination, appealing to the conservative Dixiecrat voting block.
The author has a strong criticism of Clintonian welfare reform, for which Hitchens predicts a disastrous result of throwing large amounts of minorities off of public assistance from his 1999 standpoint that did not actually happen. Hitchens cites Dick Morris' quotes of Hillary's dismissal of "our little friends" the White House was willing to sacrifice in their process of "triangulation" to develop centrist policies that actually favored Republicans. Interestingly, future Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist David Frum is quoted at the time as noting that Clinton was garnering great popularity by championing and then co-opting Republican strategies such as welfare reform and financial deregulation. Hitch painfully notes that the Democratic establishment was far too eager to go along with Clinton, who after all was elected along with a Democratic Congress and Senate through which he could have passed a number of liberal policies but chose not to.
Hitchens reminds us that insurance companies helped craft the Clinton healthcare plan, while Hillary sold the plan as being opposed by the insurers. Republicans today would likely rather have the Clinton plan than the Affordable Care Act, but both moves created easy targets of government overreach even as they incorporated Republican ideas. "The era of big government is over" was patently false as Hitchens notes the draft-dodging President went against his Joint Chiefs in enlarging NATO and signing off on billions of pork barrel defense contracts. Mandatory sentencing, expanded police laws (which Clinton now regrets), roving wiretaps, CIA expansion, are all Republican domains that Clinton expanded.
The biggest enemy in the Clinton camp is Dick Morris, who existed for a long time via codename and not as an official adviser. Hitchens relies heavily on quotes from Morris himself as well as George Stephanopolous who claimed that "For a while, Dick Morris was the real President." It's Morris' triangulation that causes Hitchens so much angst. But liberal intellectuals who fend for Clinton, like Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller, also earn Hitchens' ire.
The most damning evidence against the Clintons was the Wag the Dog of bombing Iraq and the bogus bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shif...
As the NY Times reported: "the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s."
Hitchens and others' investigation of the Al-Shifa pharmacy bombing was that it never contained chemical munitions, and had no connections to terrorism. Hence, its owner sued the US government for damages. Hitchens writes that the Joint Chiefs and FBI Director Louis Freeh (who had agents in the region doing real terrorism investigations) were kept in the dark on the raid, and the CIA opposed it. Clinton had permission from the UN Security Council to strike Iraq but canceled the operation until months later when impeachment proceedings began. Hitchens bemoans both Clinton's eagerness to kill to save his own face as well as his wanton obstruction of justice. (All the evidence is laid out in the book, I'm just summarizing here.)
Like Clinton, Inc. Hitchens documents the history of retribution against people like Kathleen Willey who made accusations against Clinton. Hitchens writes that he is one of the few in the media who did not suffer attack dogs, despite giving a deposition in the Starr investigation. Hitchens uncovers the story of an anonymous woman who claimed to be raped by a younger Clinton, whose story was known to a few friends and corroborates with the stories of others like Juanita Broaddrick. The chapter "Is there a rapist in the White House?" is quite an uncomfortable read. Hitchens blasts Al Gore as being spineless in calling Clinton out for his character.
I give this book 4.5 stars out of 5 for its rapier wit, succinctness, and appeal to truth and reason. Read it and be the judge yourself.
Hitchens' razor wit and ability to cut through the Clinton spin and get to the facts is amazing. As an atheist, it's not clear to me what basis he makes his moral judgments and outrage about the Clintons. If there is no ultimate authority of right or wrong, who is he to decide that their behavior is, in fact, unethical, and not just in his own opinion? I suppose one could say that he is writing given the laws we have on the books; those should therefore be enforced. To avoid confusion, I will therefore leave his atheism aside.
His commentary on the current political campaign is sorely missed. In 1999, Hitchens wrote that Hillary was a "a tyrant, a bully, and a lie." Judging from this Slate piece on Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign, Hitchens would be alarmed at how quickly HRC is able to either deflect or rewrite history and would be voting for Bernie Sanders. Hitch wrote this for Slate in 2008:
"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. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry."
Hitchens is critical of the media's inability of unwillingness to call HRC's lies for what they are. The media was slow to fact-check Hillary's claim to have being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who was likely actually unknown to her mother as it was years before he had climbed Mt. Everest. But HRC's claim was, years later, still being used by the Clinton campaign to create a narrative about her character formation. Revelations of Pakistanis and others contributing to Hillary's US Senate campaign were also coming to light as Hitchen's book went to press.
Not long ago, I finished Clinton, Inc. and Clinton Cash both of which were published recently. I would rate Clinton, inc. a little lower after reading Hitchens' work as it mainly expands on the weaknesses and shenanigans that Hitchens describes. While the book has been ignored as right-wing screed, Hitch is much more critical of Bill Clinton than anything Fox News would dare to air. Clinton Cash would have Hitchens' approval for following the money and influence of the Clintons post-White House, and I recommend it as a follow-up to Hitch's work. He would surely be critical of both works as not going far enough.
Hitchens is most critical of Bill Clinton as a champion of liberal (ie: left) ideals but in reality a traitor to them. Hitchens fact-checks the Clinton campaign's claims of being champions of civil rights in Arkansas, noting that some of Clintons' claims about standing up to bigots as a child were highly unlikely. Arkansas was the only state left without a civil rights statute after Clinton left office, something he never proposed. It's well-remembered that Clinton got the Democratic nomination even after skipping New Hampshire, but less-remembered why. He had fallen in the polls after the Gennifer Flowers revelations and flew back to Arkansas to sign off on the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, an African-American convict who was brain-damaged due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hitchens notes that while Clinton is remembered by some as the "first black President," he "played the race card both ways" in his "Southern strategy" to win the Democratic nomination, appealing to the conservative Dixiecrat voting block.
The author has a strong criticism of Clintonian welfare reform, for which Hitchens predicts a disastrous result of throwing large amounts of minorities off of public assistance from his 1999 standpoint that did not actually happen. Hitchens cites Dick Morris' quotes of Hillary's dismissal of "our little friends" the White House was willing to sacrifice in their process of "triangulation" to develop centrist policies that actually favored Republicans. Interestingly, future Bush speechwriter and conservative columnist David Frum is quoted at the time as noting that Clinton was garnering great popularity by championing and then co-opting Republican strategies such as welfare reform and financial deregulation. Hitch painfully notes that the Democratic establishment was far too eager to go along with Clinton, who after all was elected along with a Democratic Congress and Senate through which he could have passed a number of liberal policies but chose not to.
Hitchens reminds us that insurance companies helped craft the Clinton healthcare plan, while Hillary sold the plan as being opposed by the insurers. Republicans today would likely rather have the Clinton plan than the Affordable Care Act, but both moves created easy targets of government overreach even as they incorporated Republican ideas. "The era of big government is over" was patently false as Hitchens notes the draft-dodging President went against his Joint Chiefs in enlarging NATO and signing off on billions of pork barrel defense contracts. Mandatory sentencing, expanded police laws (which Clinton now regrets), roving wiretaps, CIA expansion, are all Republican domains that Clinton expanded.
The biggest enemy in the Clinton camp is Dick Morris, who existed for a long time via codename and not as an official adviser. Hitchens relies heavily on quotes from Morris himself as well as George Stephanopolous who claimed that "For a while, Dick Morris was the real President." It's Morris' triangulation that causes Hitchens so much angst. But liberal intellectuals who fend for Clinton, like Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller, also earn Hitchens' ire.
The most damning evidence against the Clintons was the Wag the Dog of bombing Iraq and the bogus bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shif...
As the NY Times reported: "the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s."
Hitchens and others' investigation of the Al-Shifa pharmacy bombing was that it never contained chemical munitions, and had no connections to terrorism. Hence, its owner sued the US government for damages. Hitchens writes that the Joint Chiefs and FBI Director Louis Freeh (who had agents in the region doing real terrorism investigations) were kept in the dark on the raid, and the CIA opposed it. Clinton had permission from the UN Security Council to strike Iraq but canceled the operation until months later when impeachment proceedings began. Hitchens bemoans both Clinton's eagerness to kill to save his own face as well as his wanton obstruction of justice. (All the evidence is laid out in the book, I'm just summarizing here.)
Like Clinton, Inc. Hitchens documents the history of retribution against people like Kathleen Willey who made accusations against Clinton. Hitchens writes that he is one of the few in the media who did not suffer attack dogs, despite giving a deposition in the Starr investigation. Hitchens uncovers the story of an anonymous woman who claimed to be raped by a younger Clinton, whose story was known to a few friends and corroborates with the stories of others like Juanita Broaddrick. The chapter "Is there a rapist in the White House?" is quite an uncomfortable read. Hitchens blasts Al Gore as being spineless in calling Clinton out for his character.
I give this book 4.5 stars out of 5 for its rapier wit, succinctness, and appeal to truth and reason. Read it and be the judge yourself.
May 23, 2013
One of the problems with general snarkyness (or is that snarkiness?) is that, when it is written, it’s sometimes difficult to interpret. I’m sure all of us have encountered such an experience on the web when we wrote something that was intended to be a bit of a joke; someone read it and misinterpreted it poorly; and we’re left trying to explain ourselves, which usually boils down to a quick aside like, “dude, I was j-o-k-i-n-g.” Having to point out that you made a joke essentially ruins the joke. Tempers are flared, disappointments are shared all around, and meaningful dialogue is once more squashed, albeit accidentally this time.
I’ve no doubt that Christopher Hitchens’s style is an acquired taste. I had the chance to hear him speak a handful of times when he was still alive (on television), and I was always thought he sounded educated and eloquent … but I have to also admit that I was never all that certain about which side of the fence he was on. Biting, insightful satire (and even really good sarcasm) can have the unfortunate effect of distorting one’s message by making the audience think more about the elements of the analogy instead of the actual analogy itself. Does this mean the speaker is flawed, or does it imply that the audience is flawed? Meh. Methinks it’s always somewhere in the middle.
NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO is a pretty scathing indictment of everyone’s favorite Southern ‘gentleman’ (not!) – William Jefferson Blythe Clinton – the man Conservatives love to hate and the President Progressives rush to defend. Thankfully, Hitchens peels back all of the veneer of that era to show just how devilishly flawed (or calculating) Clinton was, and he does so as a skilled lawyer would in a court of law: he raises the question in his opening argument, he presents his evidence, and he postulates his conclusion based almost entirely on those factors.
Now, I say “almost entirely” because there’s one significant element of the book that confused me greatly: about halfway through the book, Hitchens goes to great lengths to debunk the sentiments of a man’s character entering public discussion during Presidential debates. The way I read it, Hitchens thinks any review of character is flawed because there’s no possible way voters can know a man’s character as a result of speeches, political dialogues, and advertisements; on that point, I’d strongly agree, because the business of campaigns is to get votes, not to uncover identity but to cleverly ‘craft’ one.
However, then Hitchens uses the rest of the book essentially to depose Clinton – to prove that he’s a man of deeply flawed character – and I have to wonder: if this information (all of it) had come to light by an honest, deliberative press during the campaign, then wouldn’t it have been a legitimate examination of Clinton’s character? Clearly, if you’re going to use this information to establish the principle that the man is a committed and accomplished liar, then it could’ve just as convincingly been used to establish he’s a man unfit to hold the highest elected office in the land, no?
I can only hope that Hitchens would agree. He probably would … and then he’d throw out some layered riposte about me not understanding his point, his book, and my role in the universe. Such is life.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. While Hitchens’s prose will not be for everyone, it’s certainly worth review. NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO carefully dissects Clinton’s actions – some of which are even starker viewed through the passage of time – to underscore that the man was entirely willing to mislead our entire nation all at the expense of giving people something other to think about than his personal transgressions. Hopefully, history will get it right when they write the record on the man from Hope.
I’ve no doubt that Christopher Hitchens’s style is an acquired taste. I had the chance to hear him speak a handful of times when he was still alive (on television), and I was always thought he sounded educated and eloquent … but I have to also admit that I was never all that certain about which side of the fence he was on. Biting, insightful satire (and even really good sarcasm) can have the unfortunate effect of distorting one’s message by making the audience think more about the elements of the analogy instead of the actual analogy itself. Does this mean the speaker is flawed, or does it imply that the audience is flawed? Meh. Methinks it’s always somewhere in the middle.
NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO is a pretty scathing indictment of everyone’s favorite Southern ‘gentleman’ (not!) – William Jefferson Blythe Clinton – the man Conservatives love to hate and the President Progressives rush to defend. Thankfully, Hitchens peels back all of the veneer of that era to show just how devilishly flawed (or calculating) Clinton was, and he does so as a skilled lawyer would in a court of law: he raises the question in his opening argument, he presents his evidence, and he postulates his conclusion based almost entirely on those factors.
Now, I say “almost entirely” because there’s one significant element of the book that confused me greatly: about halfway through the book, Hitchens goes to great lengths to debunk the sentiments of a man’s character entering public discussion during Presidential debates. The way I read it, Hitchens thinks any review of character is flawed because there’s no possible way voters can know a man’s character as a result of speeches, political dialogues, and advertisements; on that point, I’d strongly agree, because the business of campaigns is to get votes, not to uncover identity but to cleverly ‘craft’ one.
However, then Hitchens uses the rest of the book essentially to depose Clinton – to prove that he’s a man of deeply flawed character – and I have to wonder: if this information (all of it) had come to light by an honest, deliberative press during the campaign, then wouldn’t it have been a legitimate examination of Clinton’s character? Clearly, if you’re going to use this information to establish the principle that the man is a committed and accomplished liar, then it could’ve just as convincingly been used to establish he’s a man unfit to hold the highest elected office in the land, no?
I can only hope that Hitchens would agree. He probably would … and then he’d throw out some layered riposte about me not understanding his point, his book, and my role in the universe. Such is life.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. While Hitchens’s prose will not be for everyone, it’s certainly worth review. NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO carefully dissects Clinton’s actions – some of which are even starker viewed through the passage of time – to underscore that the man was entirely willing to mislead our entire nation all at the expense of giving people something other to think about than his personal transgressions. Hopefully, history will get it right when they write the record on the man from Hope.
May 15, 2016
As the election approaches some regard Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil. That will be a hard view to maintain if one reads this book. Is it a full revelation of the facts? How could it be when 121 of the special witnesses called to testify against Clinton's corruption either pled the fifth amendment to avoid incriminating themselves or out right fled the country? In the absence of their honest testimony, the reader is presented with the evidence that does exist, and invited to bring their common sense to bear.
Set forward here are the observations, the interviews, the events, the timings, the initial lies, the exposed lies, the new lies, and the exposed new lies, concerning the abuses of power (appearing in the form of triangulation (a specific kind of political deceit), mass and individual murder, serial rape, and the outright selling of the presidency) that led the author to see Bill Clinton, and his supportive entourage, as the apex of evil.
It is short and focused. Reading it twenty years late made me feel ashamed that I had not read it earlier, and that I had allowed my own views of Clinton to be shaped by media rhetoric, marketing, and a simple want to think well of others, than by the mountain of facts, which has always been there, though pushed so far into the distance by the elites that it takes on the appearance of a molehill.
The book is timely once again, not only because Hillary is running, but because Clinton got away with it. Elected officials at every level have found it easier to sell themselves. It's not even an open secret, or a dirty one. It's been normalised to the degree that it's become the issue of this election. Will it be knowingly, openly enshrined as the new American way, or will it be struck down?
Someone famously said that choosing a leader in a democracy can be a choice of choosing the lesser evil. When presented with such a choice it can be tempting to not vote, or to cast a vote that's meaningless. Rick Mercer famously frowned on this tactic and reminded us that when faced with two evils, choosing the lesser evil is very important.
Set forward here are the observations, the interviews, the events, the timings, the initial lies, the exposed lies, the new lies, and the exposed new lies, concerning the abuses of power (appearing in the form of triangulation (a specific kind of political deceit), mass and individual murder, serial rape, and the outright selling of the presidency) that led the author to see Bill Clinton, and his supportive entourage, as the apex of evil.
It is short and focused. Reading it twenty years late made me feel ashamed that I had not read it earlier, and that I had allowed my own views of Clinton to be shaped by media rhetoric, marketing, and a simple want to think well of others, than by the mountain of facts, which has always been there, though pushed so far into the distance by the elites that it takes on the appearance of a molehill.
The book is timely once again, not only because Hillary is running, but because Clinton got away with it. Elected officials at every level have found it easier to sell themselves. It's not even an open secret, or a dirty one. It's been normalised to the degree that it's become the issue of this election. Will it be knowingly, openly enshrined as the new American way, or will it be struck down?
Someone famously said that choosing a leader in a democracy can be a choice of choosing the lesser evil. When presented with such a choice it can be tempting to not vote, or to cast a vote that's meaningless. Rick Mercer famously frowned on this tactic and reminded us that when faced with two evils, choosing the lesser evil is very important.
December 18, 2016
"...the decision by Hillary Rodham Clinton— the other half of a “buy one, get one free” sleazy lawyer couple— to try and succeed to the vacant Senatorship from the great state of New York. Everything about this campaign, and everything about this candidate, was rotten from the very start. Mrs. Clinton has the most unappetizing combination of qualities to be met in many days’ march: she is a tyrant and a bully when she can dare to be, and an ingratiating populist when that will serve. She will sometimes appear in the guise of a “strong woman” and sometimes in the softer garb of a winsome and vulnerable female. She is entirely un-self-critical and quite devoid of reflective capacity, and has never found that any of her numerous misfortunes or embarrassments are her own fault, because the fault invariably lies with others. And, speaking of where things lie, she can in a close contest keep up with her husband for mendacity. Like him, she is not just a liar but a lie; a phoney construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations."
Hitchens, Christopher. No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
I just can say thank you to Mr. Hitchens! We missing you Sir!
Hitchens, Christopher. No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
I just can say thank you to Mr. Hitchens! We missing you Sir!
August 26, 2015
While a lot of the evidences put forth by Hitchens in this short expose did seem somewhat circumstantial, chapters 5 (Clinton's War Crimes) and 6 (Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?) completely made up for the logical stretches and correlations made early on in the book.
The corroborating accounts of specific cruelties endured, each made by women who had no possible knowledge of each other's experiences and had nothing whatsoever to gain from lying,
makes it a near certainty that Clinton was indeed a big ole bag of dicks, and most probably a rapist on at least a few occasions.
However, the credibility of this book would've benefited from a writing style less inflammatory than Hitchens' usual style. It wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable a read if he had chosen a more straightforward approach though. I've always thought of his writing as somewhat masturbatory, which obviously makes it a great deal of fun when you agree with him.
The corroborating accounts of specific cruelties endured, each made by women who had no possible knowledge of each other's experiences and had nothing whatsoever to gain from lying,
makes it a near certainty that Clinton was indeed a big ole bag of dicks, and most probably a rapist on at least a few occasions.
However, the credibility of this book would've benefited from a writing style less inflammatory than Hitchens' usual style. It wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable a read if he had chosen a more straightforward approach though. I've always thought of his writing as somewhat masturbatory, which obviously makes it a great deal of fun when you agree with him.
January 22, 2008
Music to the ears of those who find America's love affair with the Clinton Crime Family a symptom of hopeless decline. Christopher Hitchens lowers his head and charges,painting a vivid picture of a clique of toadies and lapdogs led by a vain and empty pair of egomaniacs. He doesnt attack the liberalism of the Clintons but their absolute insincerity and dishonesty. He does it with consummate humor and style.A must read for all Americans.
March 10, 2016
Still miss Hitchens. Had to bone up on the evils of the Clinton political machine before the November elections. Hillary is just as culpable and grotesquely power hungry as Bill. I don't envy America's upcoming choices. Nuts, nuts, greasy politicians, and evil careerist politicians are the four choices left. Great book. Learned a load about Clinton's term in office that was swept under the rug back in the '90s and even about his sleaze in the '70s. Hitch slap!
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