During my parents’ seder on Saturday outside Philly, there was a lot of political talk, and my 7-year-old niece came up to me with a big smile. She said: "Hillary lies."
Her comment was just the cherry on the top of a ton of anti-Hillary feeling I’ve registered in center-left Democratic circles. My father had been leaning toward Hillary till he decided that her behavior at the last debate was "mean"; now there’s an Obama lawn sign outside the house. A friend who backed the Clintons to the hilt during Impeachment now fulminates about them, saying they are doing McCain’s work for him and splitting the Democratic party. Another friend says Hillary has never believed in a thing, that Chelsea has a "no-show job at some hedge fund" and a boyfriend who is also the child of a corrupt politician. He wonders why the media aren’t investigating Bill Clinton’s big givers. "He’s a high-priced lobbyist, that’s all he is." He wants to get back into the White House.
I try not to grin. I became a Clinton hater in the late 90s, in fact Clinton hatred eased my way out of the Mainstream Media. The New York Times Magazine sent me to Arkansas in ’96 to find out why people hated the Clintons, and I saw that the haters were on to something. The Clintons would stop at nothing to get and hold power. Ambitious young Bill Clinton had signed on to a one-party machine in an impoverished state to get ahead, and that machine had corrupted him. The famous "body count" of people who died in proximity to Clinton–a list that Monica dropped on to Linda Tripp’s chair one day as a hint not to talk to the feds (I never understood why more wasn’t made of this threat) was a reflection of the Arkansas machine’s ties to drug deals and degraded methods. Soon enought, the Clinton women were getting threatened.
Politics was at the heart of every Clinton scandal. Deputy counsel Vincent Foster died right around the time the Troopers were readying to come forward with their salacious stories, in summer 1993. His White House office was rifled the night he died by aides who were surely acting at Hillary’s direction. There were reports then that Foster had created a divorce file for Hillary in 1988 or so, and that the Clintons were afraid that file would get out…
A great mystery. The establishment press avoided it, because it loved the Clintons. Loved prosperity, loved what he was doing for my people.
If Hillary ends up running in the general, I hope some of this stuff comes out. Heck I hope it comes out in the next couple months. Remember when Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 1998–the same days that the House was releasing impeachment evidence, or voted to impeach? Back then everyone denied that he had political motivation, to bury the story. I wonder what they’d say now…
