Getting priorities straight

The New York Review of Books remains essential reading. Michael Tomasky reviews the two recent biographies of Hillary Clinton and makes the point everyone else has missed:

Carl Bernstein, in A Woman in Charge, and Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., in Her Way, want to relive the controversies of the Clinton White House. After an unprovoked war built on lies, the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, illegal domestic spying, government-sanctioned torture, the indefinite incarceration of suspects, a scandal surrounding efforts by the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer to install prosecutors willing to undertake blatantly political prosecutions, and astonishing tales of congressional corruption, is it not at least demeaning and superfluous to be presented with one-thousand-plus pages revisiting such questions as how many hours of billable work Hillary Clinton actually performed for Madison Guaranty? It might not be, if we learned useful new information, about both the Clinton presidency and Hillary’s more recent record in the Senate. But A Woman in Charge and Her Way—the former sometimes by intent, the latter almost always inadvertently—tell us less about Mrs. Clinton than they do about the political and journalistic cultures that allowed hysteria about the Clintons to thrive.

One thought on “Getting priorities straight

  1. Hal O'Brien

    There was a discussion with the authors of Her Way and Charlie Rose. Here are the money quotes:

    “I think (Hillary Clinton) has trouble admitting mistakes. She does play fast and loose with the facts. I also think her devotion to secrecy is quite troubling… she feels she has been unfairly criticized for years. And the way to handle that, the way to deal with it is to just try to silence critics and to have pure loyalty among her people.”

    Those are exactly the same character flaws, and the same view of the world, that has led to the arrogance, hubris, and criminality of the Bush Administration.

    Pending evidence to the contrary, I see no reason why a Hillary Clinton Administration would lead to any different results or sins, regardless of the ideology.

    Reply

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