The American Spectator

TAS Live

In Review:
Madame Hillary: The Dark Road To The White House, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. with Mark W. Davis (Regnery Publishing, 231 pages, $27.95)

It is incumbent upon a reviewer to disclose a bias or personal interest, unless it is already blatantly self-evident. For instance, any reader would realize that a hostile review of Bob Tyrrell's excellent book by, say, Sid Blumenthal might have been motivated by the reviewer's desire to ingratiate himself with the boss, Hillary Clinton. Since this review will be enthusiastic and laudatory, my own motives must be spelled out. I am a very old and good friend of Bob Tyrrell's, and absolutely loathe Hillary Clinton.

Having said that, I also like to think that I am a writer first and foremost, I take orders from no one, and am the one who won a large bet after the mid-elections of 1994 that the Clintons would win a second term, and a further bet that they would finish up their second term in office. In other words, I do not take my desires for reality, something my friend Bob Tyrrell does not do either. His timely new book gives lots of credit to Hillary for being a very shrewd and opportunistic politician.

In a blurb, the great Paul Johnson notes that Tyrrell knows more about the dark side of the Clintons than does any other writer. He also says that Tyrrell will show that Hillary is by far the more sinister and dangerous of the couple. "It will be a major exercise in the study of political deceit." Amen! Close to 100,000 copies have been printed and shipped out across this great land of ours. Will they wake anyone up while Hillary prepares her way for the White House? I am a pessimist where demagogues are concerned. We Greeks invented demagoguery, and there's no one better at it than Madame Hillary.

The book is so titled because this ambitious, power-hungry woman reminds Tyrrell of the late Madame Mao, Jian Qing. This junior senator from New York is a coat-and-tie radical, a phantasm who takes on the shape of respectability. She is not one of those left-wing students who was going to blot her résumé by knocking off a bank, or shooting a cop, or even abandoning herself to sex and drugs. No siree. This is Hillary we're talking about, not Bill or Roger. Her agenda comes from the fevered 1960s and includes such respectable concerns as peace, the environment, equality, minority rights, sexual utopia, you name it, she was for it. She always wanted change, endless change, a quest many people believe is for the better.

The author and his assiduous researcher Mark Davis trace the Clintons' shameless grab for power post-2000. This includes Hillary's chairing the Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee, where she can wield intimidating power over her colleagues, and keeping Terry McAuliffe as chairman of the Democratic National Committee with 2008 in mind.

Tyrrell dips into the Clinton mystique and asks how do two people control the oldest and largest political party in the country? Well, money for one. Hillary controls Hillpac, a phenomenally successful "leadership" political action committee, which has already disbursed more than $1 million to candidates. And with each donation she invests, Hillary strengthens her hold over Democratic officeholders. "Clearly, she understands the mechanisms of influence," says a Senate staffer.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, there are also people like the Drobnys, billionaire friends of Hillary's who have shoved more than ten million big ones her way, her friends in Hollywood such as David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, and, of course, the egregious George Soros, pictured in the book with her, all ready to pay moolah and homage to the second coming.

WHEN I WAS FIRST ASKED to review this book -- I am a Noo Yawker, after all, and she supposedly represents me -- I blanched. What could there be about Hillary that we didn't already know? Her platitudes, her lies, her melodramatic interviews with Barbara Walters, her folksy chats with Katie Couric, her not having written It Takes a Village and her refusal to give credit to those who did, and so on. Her greed in the final days of the Clinton regime, her ability to shift the blame for her husband's lies in sex cases to the victims, etc., etc., etc., as the fictional King of Siam once dictated.

But I did learn things reading this timely and necessary book. I learned that Hillary is a quick learner. In fact, she's an overlearner. For example. Having caught flak for not giving any credit to those who wrote her first opus, she graciously acknowledges that "It took a village to write Living History," her second communal try for literary stardom, one which became a great big best-seller. She's also learned to pull her punches, as in the case of Dick Morris, the political wizard-cum-toe sucker who rescued the Clintons from policy disasters through triangulation. She denies that Morris had written her successful 1996 convention speech, as reported to the prostitute by Morris, but cools it as far as the adjectives are concerned.

Mind you, the biggest lie in her "Livid History," as the author brands it, is the one that gained attention even before the book was published. This is her claim that she believed her husband's protests of innocence during the seven months between Monica Lewinsky's national debut and Bill Clinton's admission that he had used her as his comfort woman. It is all in there, the repeated lies, the vast exoneration of herself, the sanctimony, the smear campaign against Gennifer Flowers ...

Hillary's Bible was Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, an operating manual for revolution. This the author examines and comes up trumps. Alinsky has been for Hillary what Russell Kirk and James Burnham have been for the conservative mind. Of course, she now claims she broke with him, but that's just whistling Dixie.

ONCE AGAIN, THIS IS a book all people who love this country should read and take notice. It is not a hatchet job. Far from it. It is brilliantly researched and beautifully written. The only thing that depressed me while reading it was the subject.

One is not supposed to add things in a book review, but in Hillary's case, I need to make an exception. Here's my contribution to the opus:

She is unfit for any job,
Save posturing to please the mob.
Her mind, apart from greed and spite,
Is superficial and trite.
This selfish, lefty-feminist star
Uses right-wing conspiracies for PR.
One major talent she's brought to town
Is to asslick Tina Brown.

topics:
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Environment, Hollywood, NATO