A rift among the Hillary haters

Hey, Dick Morris, jealous much?

Published June 21, 2005 1:51PM (EDT)

"The Truth About Hillary" hits the bookstores today, and the right is already soaking up every last salacious detail contained therein. But there's one usually reliable Hillary hater who doesn't seem so thrilled with the new book: Dick Morris, whose own anti-Hillary book, "Rewriting History," will have to slide down the shelves to make way for Ed Klein's new smear job.

Morris, a former advisor to Bill Clinton, says in his column that Klein's accusations about the Clintons hit "below the belt" and "do not belong in the public dialogue." "I am no defender of Hillary Rodham Clintons, to put it mildly," Morris says. "But the recent charges in Ed Kleins book to the effect that she is a closet homosexual or that Bill raped her and that this act triggered Chelseas conception are as crazy as the list that was circulating around of the 20 or so people the Clintons allegedly had killed."

"Crazy" and "below the belt" -- but maybe true. At least that's the impression Morris seems to want to leave with his readers. "How can anyone say if the charges are true?" Morris asks, then lists Klein's credentials and says that he wouldn't have written what he's written unless he had "some substantiation." The real problem, Morris says, is that the most outrageous charges in the Klein book distract from what he considers the real truth about Hillary -- the "truth" he already set forth in his own book: "There is enough evidence of Hillarys penchant for deception without having to dig through her private life," Morris says.


By Tim Grieve

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog.

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