Tuesday, June 10, 2003

The reviews are coming in
And they aren't too good. Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times - A 'Zone of Privacy' With Calculated Polish:
Two leitmotifs run through Hillary Rodham Clinton's wildly hyped new memoir, "Living History."

One has to do with her changing hairstyles, which are discussed in detail at least a half dozen times, as they morphed with Madonna-like frequency from long to short, from frizzy to hair-banded to carefully coiffed.

The other has to do with Mrs. Clinton's penchant for blaming enemies, from political opponents to a "vast right-wing conspiracy," for her and her husband's failures and travails.
Hey, that pretty much sums it up!
With the exception of such revelations (most of which were publicized in a leak to The Associated Press last week and in Mrs. Clinton's interview with Barbara Walters, which was broadcast on ABC on Sunday), "Living History" is a mishmash of pious platitudes about policy (not unlike those found in the author's earlier book "It Takes a Village"); robotic asides about her official duties in Washington (not unlike those found in her Martha Stewart-esque book "An Invitation to the White House"); and by now familiar accounts of Hillary Rodham Clinton's metamorphosis over the years from Goldwater girl to liberal student activist to high-powered lawyer to first lady to senator from New York.

Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show.
More by following the link.

Well, I guess we'll have to turn to other sources for the good stuff. Tim Graham at NRO gives us some pointers in ABC’s Fairy-Tale Hillary:
All this "private-life" propaganda is designed to steer Americans around the Real Hillary: the one who ceaselessly manipulated her way onto the world stage to be publicly betrayed, and then played to the gallery demanding to be loved for it. She has mercilessly milked the Wronged-Woman routine like a star attraction at the Wisconsin State Fair. But in fact, she's always known her husband's ways, and looked out for her own careerist designs by plotting to destroy any Other Woman who got in the way of her bumper-pool path to the White House.

See the George Stephanopoulos book All Too Human, page 54, for the Real Hillary: "We have to destroy her story," she told Stephanopoulos in November 1991, when rock groupie Connie Hamzy began the bimbo eruptions by telling Penthouse that Gov. Clinton propositioned her in 1984 after she flashed him her breasts. Eleven pages later, we're inside the room as Bill and Hillary plot how to manipulate the famous 1992 60 Minutes interview. "Both Clinton and Hillary were adamant about not using the A word, arguing it was too grating, too harsh, too in-your-face to the viewers at home." Then George says he "synthesized the strategy in hand-lettered notes that I gave to Clinton when Hillary adjourned the meeting around one AM." Hillary ran the meetings that figured out how to gauzily negotiate around the obvious facts of adultery, coordinated the strategy to obliterate the ugly truths and replace them with convenient lies, and creepily worked to crumble the women a feminist would have been championing, women who were involuntarily groped or even raped, with an army of hired private investigators and journalistic hit-men (see Blumenthal, Sidney).