Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: the case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don’t show her enough appreciation, and after all she’s done for us, she may cry. Christopher Hitchens, article Slate January 2008
During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Senator Clinton made considerable use of her background and ‘experience’ to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Ba’athist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or disagree with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honour and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Christopher Hitchens
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlour? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It’s often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That’s not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. Christopher Hitchens
One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred ‘experience’ on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main ‘experience’ involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation’s health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. Christopher Hitchens
During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behaviour to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous ‘New Democrat’, you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president – only the second impeachment hearing in American history – you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The last time that I consciously wrote anything to ‘save the honour of the Left’, as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal’s champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of ‘sexual McCarthyism’, an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left’
Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week – a headline about a life that had involved real achievement – I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995 – the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy ‘experience’ – Mrs Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim ‘worked’ well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.
Senator Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Senator Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: ‘It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.’
Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Christopher Hitchens
One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an ‘out’ group, let alone a whole sex or gender. Christopher Hitchens
Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think ‘first woman president’. We think for example ‘first ex-co-president’ or ‘first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent’ or ‘first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband’s perjury rap’. Christopher Hitchens
Yet isn’t it all – all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga – exactly like that? And isn’t some of it a little bit more serious? For Senator Clinton something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her ‘greatness’ (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992 she knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008 he returns the favour by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama – yet again – a central part of our own politics? Christopher Hitchens
The big white whale Clinton ... a war criminal, a taker of bribes from foreign dictatorships, almost certainly a rapist ... Executed a black man who was so mentally retarded that he was unable to plead or to understand the charges. Christopher Hitchens, Conversations with History
What should have been charged against the president … was the abuse of power … He did use Cruise missiles against the Sudan on a target that was evidently bogus in the week of Ms Lewinsky’s return to the Grand Jury. Christopher Hitchens, televised interview
The guy’s a monster. ibid.
It’s hard to keep all these female victims in perspective … Kathleen Willey … I have heard since she has been subject to various kinds of intimidation. Christopher Hitchens, interview CSpan2 TV, No-one Left to Lie To, Youtube 1.00.55
The MO of this White House: it’s tenth-rate and nasty and underhand. ibid.
He’ll say and try anything – he’s a complete solipsist and he’s completely without scruple. ibid.
Clintonism: it’s profane, it’s blasphemed, by turning the Oval Office into a cheap massage parlour, the Lincoln bedroom into a cheap motel for fat cats, and Arlington Cemetery into something that can be franchised for fundraising. ibid.
Supervised the execution of a mentally disabled, a lobotomised, defendant. ibid.
William Jefferson Clinton is the first American president to have attended family therapy sessions. Christopher Hitchens, CSpan2 host presentation, Youtube 48.57
The promise on Bosnia was not to stand by and let Serbia take over Bosnia and expel the Muslim population … The same pledge was made about the refugees from Haiti … the Homosexual community being told, well it’s lost in committee somewhere. ibid.
We have a cabinet now that has as many millionaires in it as Bush’s did, as Reagan’s did. ibid.