Ed Klein's new book, "The Truth About Hillary," feels more like porn than politics.
Though the former Newsweek and New York Times Magazine editor’s book, “The Truth About Hillary” has yet to be released, it has already reached number one on Amazon. Does that make it a good book? Hardly, but the debate that has grown around the release of this book is interesting, to say the least.…
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26 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Hang on though, maybe the book in question should be read before conclusions are jumped to and the like? how can anyone say whether purchasing the book is like paying 20 dollars to see a train wreck if they haven't actually read the book in the first place?
27 - David Flanagan
Bill O'Reilly read the books, but certain pieces and excerpts have been leaked to generate media attention. And you know what? It has worked.
The printer recently announced they were expanding the number of initial copies by 50 or 100 thousand.
David
28 - Al Barger
John McCain recognizes no political principles of freedom. He doesn't stand for a smaller government, and shows no real principles.
In particular, his McCain-Feingold political speech censorship bill marks him as an authoritarian unfit for public office.
I don't recall any Bush personal attacks on McCain, but then I was busy with my own senate campaign. Are you saying that Bush's people were somehow using McCain's adoption of a non-Caucasian child to discredit him with voters? I didn't hear any of this.
Also it doesn't sound right to me. Not that Dubya would never play dirty, but I don't see how this would play. Seems like adopting a child would be seen as a positive thing by the big majority of voters.
Regardless of what Bush did or didn't do to poor little John McCain, I wouldn't vote for the bastard for dog catcher.
29 - Al Barger
Besides a total lack of political principles, John McCain earned my eternal enmity with his McCain-Feingold campaign censorship law.
And yet if I scratched a copy of the First Amendment onto a 2x4 and smacked the esteemed senator upside the head with it, they'd make it out as if I was the bad guy.
30 - El Bicho
Al, feel free to Google "john mccain dirty tricks south carolina" unless your worried that the facts will get in the way of your opinions.
Better yet, let me make it easy for you. The Bush 2000 team alleged that McCain's Bangladeshi-born adopted daughter was his illegitimate black child. That didn't play well with Southern conservative voters. If you're surprised by that, it would explain your failed Senate run.
31 - Al Barger
El Bicho, I simply don't care if big mean old Dubya played rough with McCain. That still does not give him the right to stifle critical free speech about elections. He sucks. Screw him.
Also, your gratuitous personal dig is just a hateful non-sequiter. What, you're saying that I could have beaten the most popular politician in the state if I'd just known to make up some cheesy racist rumor?
32 - Silas Kain
Many a racist rumor has done in a politician especially in the Bible Belt, Al. Perhaps being on the fringes of it in Indiana segregates you from how politics operate in the heart of Dixie. Being a white man with an illegitimate child of color is tantamount to being Satan in the eyes of many a white fundamentalist Christian. We've come a long way in 200 years, haven't we, Al?
With all that being said, I honestly believe that we need more men who think along your lines in Congress. That way the American people would wake up and finally force campaign finance reform and the way business is done at the Federal level.
33 - Nancy
The irony of the Bush/Rove lies about McCain's "illegitimate child of color" is that one of the staunchest, most conservative racist GOP-ers actually DID have a secret black child, a daughter. But no one in the GOP raised a rat's ass about that, even tho it seems to have been an open secret in the party. Talk about two-faced hypocrites.
What I don't understand is why McCain continued/-es to put up with, much less support, anything Smirk says or does, after the dirty tricks & lies he played on McCain. And Al, if you're concerned about free speech & elections, you should be more concerned about big mean ol' Bush, since he's one of today's prime squelchers of free speech via intimidation and smears, and elections via dirty tricks. Or do you perhaps mean, you don't like it that McCain has tried to put a halt to the practice of obscenely wealthy people, and multinational corporations, buying elections because they can?
34 - todd
Al you are being a bit naive about how a president attacks his enemies... he doesn't hold a press conference one day and announce that McCain is a race mixer, he has one of the thousands (and now with blogs, possible millions) of willing mouth pieces do it.
I don't listen to Limbaugh much anymore, but in the rare times I hear him on AM up here in Rochester, he has ussually been saying something deragatory about McCain, and Limbaugh does not operate without some measure of coordination with the GOP leadership.
And I agree, McCain is an anti freedom guy straight to his core. Anti liberty and a war monger to boot.
35 - Silas Kain
Once again the original subject matter of this thread has been overlooked, especially by me. There will be plenty of time to debate the merits of a McCain-Tancredo Administration vs. a Clinton-??? Administration soon enough.
The Providence Eagle, arguably the best alternative newspaper in Rhode Island, has a great article by Dan Kennedy on the "Trouble with being Hillary". He begins his article with the following:
IS THERE A more reviled public figure in America today than Hillary Rodham Clinton? Well, okay: Scott Peterson. But in the large and growing class of Politicians Thinking About Running for President, the junior senator from New York is surely the most controversial and - yes - the most despised..."
Hillary is despised. Hillary is adored. Hillary represents the best about American women. Hillary represents what's worst about liberals. Hillary has become both the villian and the victim in the game of American politics. Is it fair to hold her to such a high level of accountability? Kennedy brings up some very good points in the piece. But the story is summed up in one sentence: when has politics ever been fair?
36 - Nancy
Well, first off, women never get a fair shake in politics: the vast majority of men in political coteries refuse to share power, and those women strong enough to take it anyway are invariably labelled as whores, dykes, etc. in pitiful, cheap attempts by said males to discredit and smear the evil woman who dares to take her share instead of humbly waiting for a crumb to be tossed. Consider the strong women of history: every single one has been slandered for refusing to remain subject to male domination. I would list them, but I don't have all day, and everyone reading these blogs generally has a good enough knowledge of history to know at least a dozen off the top of their heads. This is not to inveigh against the nature of the beast, but simply to cite history & human evolution (ironic, no?): all male hominids, whether chimps or congressmen, display this same jealous hoarding of power; it's simply wired into their brains. Females display it, too, but to a markedly lesser degree and intensity, with rare exceptions.
In regard to Clinton specifically, I think the Right hates Clinton partially because she's smart (smarter than most of them), strong, and doesn't give a damn about them and their garbage, and partially because she is associated w/their chosen symbolic arch-nemesis, Bill, just the same as the Left starts frothing at the mouth thinking about W. It's somewhat odd, because having been the injured victim of Slick Willie's infidelities, one would think she'd get a bit of sympathy because of it, but it's possible (altho unlikely) that the men of the Right feel they have more in common with a fellow male who is a libertine than a woman overly forceful & articulate for their tastes. After all, women have been told by their own mothers for millenia that no man likes a woman who is smarter than he is, so play dumb. Just a hypothesis.
Actually, the knee-jerk reaction is almost comical: mention Hillary, and the typical conservative (especially the more extreme version) becomes red-faced, breathing becomes labored, the eyes bug out, the tongue almost but not quite swells & the throat restricts (as does the brain) causing intermittant gobbling and choking amidst the vomit of verbal abuse. It's really surprising at least a few of them haven't died of apoplexy thus far. I'll bet if the hospitals did a more thorough job of determining cause of death, they'd find that probably a significant percentage of strokes & heart attacks could be attributed to our gal Hil.
37 - Silas Kain
Nancy, does this mean under a Hillary Presidency the Federal Government would be mandated to provide epinehphrine kits to all extreme right wingers?
38 - Al Barger
Nancy, you can't buy an election if the voters aren't selling. You call it buying and election, I call it free speech. If you think the money in some campaign is sleazy, make that an issue for the voters in that race.
In fact, though, much of the now censored expressive spending would be not from a few rich fat cats, but from organizations of average citizens, such as Planned Parenthood and the NRA.
Leaving that aside though, even the fat cats have every right in the world to spend their money on tv spots and such what. George Soros should spend every nickel of his money on ads about what a no-good shit he thinks Dubya is, if that is his desire.
Nor do I mean to particularly defend Dubya. Hey, the bastard signed the damned McCain-Feingold law. So screw him too.
Still, I have trouble believing that some half-assed rumor about having a mixed race child would negatively impact a candidate with any significant number of voters in this century. Maybe I'm just too pure at heart or plain old naive, but Jebus.
39 - Nancy
Al, I think you can buy an election even if the voters aren't selling, just by having so much money to pour into advertising/marketing/influence peddling and whatnotelse that essentially individual rights are completely erased. Marketers have studied mass psychology for years, as have pols and their flackies. There's an entire industry - subindustries, even - for it. If you repeat on TV and radio and in print often enough: the moon is pink, people actually start to believe it ... not that the majority of people are very swift to begin with. So it's even easier when you're targeting an intellectually lazy, half-educated, moronically-oriented population with 20-second attention spans who think classic literature is Cliffs Notes to begin with.
I think the only solution to parity and honesty in elections may be to limit ALL campaign spending, for anything, from food to transportation to PR, to a flat figure - perhaps a few million, provided entirely from tax funds somehow (give me some time, I can't work out all the details in an hour, thanks), do not pass go, no exceptions, no excuses, no free non-funded support (like free hotel, travel at the expense of would-be supporters, etc.). Maybe, perhaps, if strictly enforced (hold all the candidates' kids hostage until after they've been audited and cleared? How about, more realistically, if the winner or staff were caught knowingly violating the standards, s/he forfeits the election?) it might work and we could actually have clean elections again, altho I don't the first order of business with too many would be to find loopholes. But if all the holes were closed, and the penalites too high to make it worthwhile to cheat...?
40 - Al Barger
Nancy, you premise this on the idea that voters are stupid and incapable of sorting out the noise of an expensive ad campaign. Sometimes I might would think you are right, but if you accept that idea we're just screwed for having any kind of democracy. Rather than some self-appointed schmucks deciding who's allowed to say how much of what, I'd rather go by the constitution and count on voters figuring it out for themselves.
41 - Nancy
Well, I wish I were as sanguine as you, but I read about this stuff, and see how people react, and in truth, Barnum was righter than even he thought.
42 - gonzo marx
argh..one of my most hated bits form the Supremes...money is NOT fucking speech
money is "legal tender for all debts, public and private" ....sez so right here on the label...that may be a lot of things, but it sure as shit ain't speech
the "reasoning" was that money was required for candidates to advertise on television...my problem there is that according to the whole bullshit concept the FCC is based on(an unelected body that supposedly guards our Interests in the public airwaves, but censors content) sez that the PUBLIC owns the fucking airwaves...
so why not just allocate x amount of airtime to each candidate
speaking of which ..anyone else remember the old "equal time" regulation form the FCC? remember what made it go away?
anyone but me think there is a direct correlation to the harsh partisan tactics used in political discourse today and the fact that "equal time" is no longer required?
as for McCain...i wanted to vote for him in 2000, lots of reasons...when the shit happened in outh Carolina, it made up my mind as to why i should dislike the Shrub/Rove...you know..ethics and the lack there of
but any cachet i had for McCain went away when, after he lost, he turned around and became the Shrub's personal bitch...did it again in '04, and still does it upon command today...
Hillary?..please, spare me
guess i'm voting for Frank Zappa...again
yes...i know he's dead, what's yer point?
Excelsior!
43 - Nancy
There was a good article on this book today (Thurs. 6/23) in the Washington Post, Style section, by a former editor of Klein's. If this book was done for political flack, altho selling well as all 'scandal' books tend to do, it is creating a sort of backlash, even among Republicans, but especially (and understandably) among women on all parts of the political spectrum. Guess it's one thing for one woman to trash another a la Kitty Kelley, but for a man to trash a woman is still a no-no.