Free Republic

How an Americanist devoted to destroying international alliances became the US envoy to the UNIn the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were...

LIVING HISTORY By Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster. 562 pp. $28 THE CLINTON WARS By Sidney Blumenthal Farrar Straus Giroux. 822 pp. $30 What Hillary Rodham Clinton says about herself -- "I have never been as good or as bad as my most fervid supporters and opponents claimed" -- can be said as well of William Jefferson Clinton. Also: "Neither the fawning admiration nor the virulent rage seemed close to the truth." In his eight years in the White House, Bill Clinton aroused so much of both that it's difficult, at this still-recent remove, to get an objective fix...

Democrat activists to Clintons: 'Shut up' By Dick Polman Inquirer Staff Writer Bill and Hillary: Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Such is the Democratic lament, as the first couple emeritus bestrides the stage once again, soaking up precious attention that otherwise might go to the party's presidential candidates. The candidates want to talk about 2004 and beyond. But those ubiquitous Clintons are poised to return us to 1998, the year of soaring tech stocks and sordid scandal, the year of Seinfeld's demise and Viagra's debut, the year when an intern's soiled dress sent conservative sleuths into overdrive....

St. Bill! In Sid’s Gospelby Andrew Sullivan The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 822 pages, $30. Only a few chapters into Sidney Blumenthal’s extraordinary account of the Clinton Presidency, it dawned on me what the book reminded me of. I wonder why it took me so long. It’s not that I am unused to Sidney’s prose, or his politics, or his inimitable intellectual hauteur. I’d spent well over a year editing his essays for The New Republic during the Clinton campaign in 1991 and 1992. I’d spent what must have been an accumulated few days of...

May 19, 2003 'Clinton Wars' Seems to Be Proving an Apt TitleBy JIM RUTENBERG hey are only two sentences buried in more than 800 pages of text. But those sentences in "The Clinton Wars," the new book by the former Clinton administration aide Sidney Blumenthal, have made Chris Matthews, the host of "Hardball" on MSNBC, more animated than normal, according to executives at NBC News. Associated Press/CNBCChris Matthews is said to be irked by comments about him in a new book. In his book, Mr. Blumenthal writes that Mr. Matthews wanted a job in the administration and "lobbied the White...

When her book "It Takes a Village" was published in 1996, Hillary Rodham Clinton was assailed for not mentioning the ghostwriter who had been paid $120,000 to help. Her aide and confidant Sidney Blumenthal is now ready to set the record straight on this Clinton contretemps and hundreds of others. His most often repeated assertion, throughout an 800-plus-page memoir and political treatise, is this: "The charge was, of course, completely false." Writing throughout "The Clinton Wars" with the patience of a schoolteacher aiding the benighted, Mr. Blumenthal explains that Mrs. Clinton has proof that she wrote the book herself. But...