No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

119 Pages·2012·0.73 MB·English

by  Christopher Hitchens

NO ONE LEFT
TO LIE TO
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
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and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case
of the Elgin Marbles Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A
Biography God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything The
Portable Atheist
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Arguably: Essays
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Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish The Missionary
Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice A Long Short War: The
Postponed Liberation of Iraq ESSAYS
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports For the Sake of
Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere Love, Poverty
and War: Journeys and Essays COLLABORATIONS
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner) Blaming
the Victims (edited with Edward Said) When the Borders Bleed: The
Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kash) International Territory:
The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos) Vanity Fair’s
Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
NO ONE LEFT
TO LIE TO
THE TRIANGULATIONS OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
Christopher Hitchens
This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012
Published in the United States by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, by arrangement with
Verso, an imprint of New Left Books
Copyright © Christopher Hitchens 1999, 2000
Foreword to this edition copyright © Douglas Brinkley 2012
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Allen & Unwin
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ISBN 978 1 74331 193 6
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Laura Antonia and Sophia Mando,
my daughters
Contents
Foreword to the New Edition
Acknowledgments
Preface
ONETriangulation
TWOChameleon in Black and White
THREEThe Policy Coup
FOURA Question of Character
FIVEClinton’s War Crimes
SIXIs There a Rapist in the Oval Office?
SEVENThe Shadow of the Con Man
Afterword
Foreword
Let’s be clear right off the bat: Christopher Hitchens was duty-bound to slay
Washington, D.C., scoundrels. Somewhere around the time that the Warren
Commission said there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the Johnson
administration insisted there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, Hitchens
made a pact with himself to be a principled avatar of subjective journalism. If a
major politician dared to insult the intelligentsia’s sense of enlightened reason,
he or she would have to contend with the crocodile-snapping wrath of Hitchens.
So when five-term Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became U.S. president in
1993, full of “I didn’t inhale” denials, he was destined to encounter the bite.
What Clinton couldn’t have expected was that Hitchens—in this clever and
devastating polemic—would gnaw off a big chunk of his ass for the ages. For
unlike most Clinton-era diatribes that reeked of partisan sniping of-the-moment,
Hitchens managed to write a classic takedown of our forty-second president—on
par with Norman Mailer’s The Presidential Papers (pathetic LBJ) and Hunter S.
Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (poor Nixon)—
with the prose durability of history. Or, more simply put, its bottle vintage holds
up well.
What No One Left to Lie To shares with the Mailer and Thompson titles is a
wicked sense of humor, razorblade indictments, idiopathic anger, high élan, and
a wheelbarrow full of indisputable facts. Hitchens proves to be a dangerous foe
to Clinton precisely because he avoids the protest modus operandi of the antiwar
1960s. Instead of being unwashed and plastered in DayGlo, he embodies the
refined English gentleman, swirling a scotch-and-Perrier (“the perfect delivery
system”) in a leather armchair, utilizing the polished grammar of an Oxford don
in dissent, passing judgment from history’s throne. In these chapters, the
hubristic Hitchens dismantles the Clinton propaganda machine of the 1990s, like
a veteran safecracker going click-back click-click-back click until he gets the
goods. Detractors of Hitchens over the years have misguidedly tattooed him with
the anarchistic “bomb-thrower” label. It’s overwrought. While it’s true that
Hitchens unleashes his disdain for Clinton right out of the gate here, deriding