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All Hillary, all day
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April 10, 2000 | The event was sponsored by the right-leaning institute's magazine and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a conservative outfit headed by David Horowitz, the combative leftist-turned-rightist author and Salon columnist. The lineup of speakers included nearly 100 Hillary friends and Hillary foes, but tilted toward the Hillary-sucks side. Panelists included renowned Clinton hater Christopher Hitchens; Joyce Milton and Laura Ingraham, both authors of anti-Hillary books; and Horowitz himself. The conference opened with bad news. Dick Morris, it was announced, had canceled without explanation. Why would the toe-sucking political consultant -- a one-time Clinton ally who has been a prominent Hillary slasher -- pass up the chance to twist the knife once more? The first speaker, Nation and Vanity Fair columnist Hitchens, offered an explanation: Perhaps it was because Hitchens repeatedly has accused Morris of being a "procurer and pimp for Mr. Clinton." Hitchens meant those charges literally, but at this forum he provided no further details regarding this salacious aside. After all, Hillary, not Bill, was the piņata of the day.
Hitchens whacked the first lady for maintaining a "split personality" as she shifts between "strong woman" (such as when she recalled Morris to the White House) and "weak sob sister" (such as when she attributed her hazy recollection of her suspicious commodities deal to the fact she was pregnant at the time). He compared her unfavorably with Eleanor Roosevelt. FDR's wife, he argued, tried "to get her husband to do the unpopular thing, the uncommercial thing" -- supporting the Spanish loyalists besieged by Franco's fascists, abolishing Jim Crow. Hitchens further criticized Clinton for having "justified" her husband's brutish infidelities, and for displaying an "abnormal want of curiosity" about Juanita Broaddrick's charge that Bill raped her years ago. But where Clinton has set new heights of mendacity, Hitchens concluded, is in the field of ethnic pandering. Noting that all politics in New York is "global" -- by which he meant kowtowing to ethnic groups -- Hitchens asserted that "never" has this game "been played with more cynicism than Mrs. Clinton has brought to it." His evidence: her miscues regarding Palestine, the amnesty for the jailed Puerto Rican activists, the St. Patrick's Day parade and a Pakistani-American fund-raiser. Hitchens' claim that her pandering is abnormal may be something of a stretch. He often argues in his bad-boy way that hate is healthy, if directed at the proper people and institutions.If that is true, then regarding Hillary, Hitchens is in the pink. Hillary's critics from the right are deeply offended by the first lady for other reasons, though they had some difficulty explaining all of them. Milton, the author of "The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton," observed that it was not Clinton's marriage that differentiated her from other first ladies -- plenty of past presidents have been cheats. But "the thing that makes her different is ... hyperactivity. She's very excessive in everything she does." But wouldn't that describe other politicians -- and Nancy Reagan, who was a control freak when it came to looking out for her husband? --- In trying to define "what riles people so much" about the Clintons, Milton maintained that when Bill and Hillary are accused of wrongdoing, their immediate response is to blame someone else, that they have no sense of shame. Ronald Reagan didn't exactly take responsibility for Iran-contra. Newt Gingrich, now an AEI fellow, hasn't expressed shame for his extramarital affair. "Not that she should get down on her knees and grovel," Milton commented, "but maybe say, 'I went a little overboard when I blamed the Monica stories on a vast right-wing conspiracy.'" Then Milton took another tack: "She's so bossy ... A lot of people have trouble with that." Is that really what has the Hillary-haters so upset?
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