Clinton spin as utter blur

“HRC” (for Hillary Rodham Clinton) is pure propaganda, noticeable from the opening pages, when she’s referred to only as “Hillary” long before Bill shows up, which might have justified the first-name chumminess as a way of avoiding confusion between two people named Clinton.

“Hillary” it remains throughout the book as authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes pile on the Superwoman schlock, page after awful page. These two writers are identified as “journalists”, having covered Washington for the website Politico. One can only surmise what plum jobs await them if there is a Clinton II West Wing.

Hillary, they say, is “mulling” another bash at the female gender’s “last glass ceiling”, the one in which she put “18 million cracks” with that number of votes in her 2008 lunge for the US presidency. She’s not mulling, though – she’s planning, and “HRC”, this purported “unauthorised biography”, is testing the glass ceiling for thickness.

Who is going to buy this book? Prospective campaign financiers. It’s far too “inside” to be of interest to the average voter. It’s really just a series of shout-outs to all the denizens of Hillaryland and a hit list of the barbarians blocking her at the White House gates. Republicans and the tea aficionados will ignore the book regardless. No “state secrets” are shared, as the subtitle implies. 

And, unless you find some sort of thrill in the never-ending soap opera in DC, there’s is zero drama. Except, that is, for the one issue on which the candidate remains perilously vulnerable: how the Obama administration and especially Clinton’s State Department handled the deadly militant attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 

Allen and Parnes go as far as acknowledging that someone at State screwed up, but it must have been someone down the ladder from Secretary Clinton, and thus her readiness to accept responsibility for the death of the ambassador and others is purely “noble”. 

Obama, as head of government, shouldered the responsibility too, but in this book absolutely no one gets to steal Hillary’s limelight. With the sole exceptions of Hillary and her daughter, possible future president (and book subject) Chelsea, every single figure mentioned is deeply flawed, including Bill and, of course, every other likely contender for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Speaking of flawed individuals, David Petraeus, the Army’s “surgin’ general” of Iraq fame and fallen angel of adultery infamy, earned his place in the authors’ hearts by giving up his private quarters on a military plane to Hillary during a 2010 Middle East visit. He slept on the floor outside. 

Two years later when he was caught stuffing his biographer with more than just anecdotes, Hillary wrote to him sympathetically: “I have a little experience with that.” Petraeus is duly quoted at length in this book, praising Hillary as a presidential candidate. How many wrong things can you spot in this picture?

If you’re going to read this book, you’d better read this article by Ralph Nader too: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/11/the-dynastic-hillary-bandwagon/

 

 

 

HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Published by Crown, 2014

Available at Asia Books, Bt716 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey