Reviews for No One Left to Lie to: The Politics of America's Worst Family

The average rating for No One Left to Lie to: The Politics of America's Worst Family based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-28 00:00:00 Curtis Halsted Christopher Hitchens was not what you would call a team player. His refusal to be pinned down as aligning neatly to the Left or Right of the political spectrum is a source of repeated consternation for his supporters, many of whom still cannot reconcile their admiration of the man himself with his support of neoconservative policies like the Iraq War. He was a self-confessed contrarian, but more importantly he possessed an unwavering moral compass which compelled him (with seeming indifference to the personal consequences) to act on his convictions when others would remain silent. No One Left to Lie To is a gloriously acerbic polemic that is leveled directly at a President remembered by most on the Left as "one of the good ones", and the book is likely to entirely disabuse the reader of any notions to that effect. Was Bill Clinton the worst president in America's history? Certainly one could locate better targets for that honour, but it is nonetheless clear that there was a sinister side to Clinton's character that has been largely ignored or actively silenced, ironically often by the same people who would ordinarily be opposed to exactly the kinds of wrongdoing of which he has been accused. And that is the crux of Clinton's strategy of triangulation as detailed in this book. Put simply, triangulation is the practice of promising to the Left (which has the votes), while delivering to the Right (which has the money). The malignant genius of this approach is the way in which the duped supporters not only accept and rationalise the broken promises, but actively defend the politician when they deliver for their political opponents. Once seen, the racket of triangulation is hard to unsee. This was the same template used by Obama eight years later, who ran for office on a platform of reform, only to deliver mediocre change in the form of a fundamentally corporatist healthcare bill, and a continuation of many of Bush's policies. Very little was given, apart from promises, to the people supported his run for office. But even so, Obama did at least deliver some incremental improvements. Clinton, on the other hand, actively worked against the wishes of his constituents in his degradation of Welfare, leaving the situation worse than when he took office. This strategy that has been so effective has been remarkably difficult for the public at large to detect. But it could be argued that such repeated and consistent dishonesty has fostered the necessary conditions of deep cynicism and discontent that has enabled the recent success of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump - candidates who although they stand apart in policy, represent to the electorate a departure from the duplicitous politics of old. However misguided it may be to look toward someone like Trump as a paragon of honesty, the fact is that the voting public is finally realising what a dishonest politician looks like, and thus certainly Clinton bears some of the responsibility for the current course of events. But I digress. Perhaps the most shocking revelation in this book comes in the chapter provocatively titled, "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?", where Hitchens describes an unproved but very credible allegation of rape by Clinton against one Juanita Broaddrick. I repeat Juanita's account of the incident here verbatim, in all its nauseating glory: I had coffee sitting on a little table over there by the window. And it was a real pretty window view that looked down at the river. And he came around me and sort of put his arm over my shoulder to point to this little building. And he said that he was real interested, if he became governor, to restore that little building, and then all of a sudden, he turned me around and started kissing me... I first pushed him away... Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip... He starts to bite on my top lip, and I try to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened... It was a real panicky, panicky situation. And I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to - you know - to please stop. But that's when he would press down on my right shoulder and he would bite on my lip. Hitchens describes what happened next: Her skirt was torn at the waist, her pantyhose ripped at the crotch, and the [at that time] attorney general of Arkansas forced an entry. But Juanita continues: When everything was over with and he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says "You'd better get some ice on that." And he turned and went out the door. The violence of the attack and the extreme callousness of its conclusion makes this perhaps the most striking and egregious of the examples described, but this is by no means an isolated incident. There are a number of accounts that are concordant in their details (for example many report lip-biting), and have been reported independently by a number of women. This pattern of callousness and lack of personal control is evident also in Clinton's official actions while President and Governor of Arkansas, for example in his handling of the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector and his involvement in the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. On these examples I will not elaborate, in the interest of keeping this review somewhat concise. But the short of all of this is that I absolutely won't be able to look at "Bubba" in the same forgiving light ever again. I cannot write a review of this book in August of 2016 without making mention of the upcoming Presidential election, in which the American people (of which mercifully I am not part), are required to make the unenviable choice between Mrs Clinton (who is not herself without guilt), and an incompetent dangerous buffoon. While it is certainly possible to produce a list of not insignificant ways in which a Trump presidency might be superior to a Clinton one, it is clear that the only rational choice is to assiduously and with the urgency of a man fleeing his executioner, vote to avoid a Trump presidency at all costs. I would urge Americans to perform this act not with any relish or pride in the outcome, but with the bitter resolve of a person swallowing a particularly nasty, but necessary dose of medicine.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-19 00:00:00 George Hofstetter 'Your heart on fire and your brain on ice ~ Vladimir Lenin "Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal, the open mind against the credulous" - Christopher Hitchens. THE BLURB In No One Left to Lie To, Christopher Hitchens portrays President Bill Clinton as one of the most ideologically skewed and morally negligent politicians of recent times. In a blistering polemic which shows that Clinton was at once philanderer and philistine, crooked and corrupt, Hitchens challenges perceptions - of liberals and conservatives alike - of this highly divisive figure. With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right and argues that the president's personal transgressions were inseparable from his political corruption. To understand this author's book on Bill Clinton, one has to understand the angle he is coming from first. He was a controversial journalist, initially left-wing, and a widely published author. He traveled the world reporting for publications such as The Nation, The New Statesman, The Daily Express, The Evening Standard,(Britain), The Atlantic, Vanity Fair(American) and various others. As a staff writer and editor at The New Statesman he fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The author never wavered on fixing his devastating gaze on figures such as Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and the Clintons. His lasting legacy is probably his atheism. His death in 2011 ended his reign as probably the most articulate and contraversial intellectual of his generation. "He was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar", wrote Vanity Fair where he was a contributing editor.. Smart and funny. He did not mind to disagree with anyone. He never took it personally. It never affected his friendships with people. It was once said that his daily intake of alcohol was enough to kill or stun the average mule. He was a literary bad-ass. He was known for taking some unpopular stands and if you hated him for that, he was just fine with it. In fact, he once remarked: "If you don't like what I say, or disagree, take a number, stand in line and kiss my ass." He was regarded as the most likable and incredibly nice guy, good-humored with a modern approach to everything. His followers regarded him as the most memorable iconoclast of our time. He was born in the English middle class. His mother did everything to pay for his education in a much revered private Christian-based elite school, which he attended from the age of eight to eighteen. She apparently said to his father that if there was to be an upper class in this country, her son was going to be part of it. He attended Oxford (as contemporary of Bill Clinton), was a Marxist and leader of the revolutionary left. In the Seventies he started to work as a journalist at a left-wing publication. However, everything changed after 9-11. In his opinion the radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience, which he later would define as 'Islamfascism'. Oscar Wilde's phrase, "the problem with socialism is that it wastes too much time on evening meetings", inspired Christopher to reconsider the cause he had chosen. The events of 9-11 had this British Trotskyite lost his faith in socialism. He ended his 20-year relationship with the The Nation magazine which shocked everyone around him. After that he supported the invasion of Irak and Afghanistan and loosely became a 'libertarian socialist'. He once admitted being Republican, but only because he was Antiroyalist. It was his reason for leaving Britain in 1981 to become an American citizen. Hitchen, or Hitch, and 'The Hitchman', as he was known to his plethora of friends and supporters, became a highly sought-after speaker and orator all over the country. A one-man-band of rebellion and straight talk. Some people described his form of investigative journalism as direct and acerbic, although his lectures and speaking gigs were enthusiastically attended by thousands of people who just could not endure the lies and deceit any longer. It has gone on for too many years. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Bill Clinton a raging psycho, whose legacy, he said, would be one of a regime of nothingness punctuated by nastiness. The American Right was 'rather an unpolished crew, the sort of people who tore the country, calling for sexual abstinence among teenagers.' Dick Morris was 'a sleazy political consultant, ultra conservative, (who used to work for Jesse Helms), an unscrupulous money man, a bagman, and an occasional procurer of women for Bill Clinton, his only male friend.' Bill Clinton's pimp. Dick Morris coined the term Triangular which forms part of the title of this book. He regarded Princess Diana as, first an foremost, a cult figure, and secondly 'a slow ranger, narcissistic, good-time girl with a very bad taste in men'. Mother Theresa was no saint, more like a fraud, a liar and a thief. (Read his book, The Missionary Position-Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, which he initially wanted to title "Sacred Cow.") He also took on religion, as the 'despotism of the sky' in no uncertain terms. His book God Is Not Great - how religion poisons everything became an international bestseller. He regarded himself as a neo-atheist...Hitch became a crusader against 'clerical and theocratical bullying'. Religion, according to him, included 'nuclear-armed mullahs, as well as insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools.' He encouraged atheist to a "genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry." Source : Bluejaysway.com I want to throw in a small and humble comment here: Hitchen's description of religion corresponds nicely with the definition of Communism and Socialism, or even so-called Neosocialism. Quite an irony. At first they fight for the freedom of speech and then eventually withdrew it, often with tyrannical fervor. Many sociologists agree on the similarity between political Fascism, Religion and Communism. All three movements often require the followers to distinguish themselves by wearing a uniform, differentiating them from everyone else around them (the burka and white robes (Islam), yellowish-orange robes (Budha), black cassocks or long white robes (Catholic priests), the Jewish black robes and long beards, different uniforms, with red scarves by Communists, etc. I wish I could ask Mr. Hitchens to comment on that. In fact, the urge to find global peace is a common goal in all three ideologies. It probably explains his passive aggressiveness towards all three ideologies, landing himself in a No Man's Land, throwing stones at all the followers of the three 'No-No's' in his book. His moral compass, of treating everyone(even Bill Clinton and a few others) with respect, as well as a deep gentlemanly compassion can probably be found in all of it. Nevertheless, I am forever a huge admirer of Christopher Hitchens for the very same reasons as the thousands of others who mourn his passing. He made me laugh and challenged me to think and explore. He was straightforward, honest, extremely intelligent, and to the point. Kind, warm, humorous, witty, and deeply human. I just loved his ironic, sarcastic wit. An excellent obituary(and short biography) to this author by the New York Times can be found here: Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62 . You can watch numerous videos of him on Youtube. AND NOW ABOUT THE BOOK :-)) I read the twelfth edition. This book has gone places, for sure. It remained an international bestseller for many months. Quotes from the introduction, written by historian Douglas Brinkley: 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 him on Page One as a bird-dogging "crooked president," the beauty of this deft polemic is that our avenging hero proceeds to prove the relative merits of this harsh prosecution. Hemingway famously wrote that real writers have a built-in bullshit detector'no one has ever accused Hitchens of not reading faces. What goaded him the most was that Clinton, the so-called New Democrat, with the help of his Machiavellian-Svengali consultant Dick Morris, decided the way to hold political power was by making promises to the Left while delivering to the Right. This rotten strategy was called Triangulation. All Clinton gave a damn about, Hitchens maintains, was holding on to power. As a man of the Left, an English-American columnist and critic for The Nation and Vanity Fair, Hitchens wanted to be sympathetic to Clinton. His well-honed sense of ethics, however, made that impossible. He refused to be a Beltway liberal muted by the "moral and political blackmail" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's "eight years of reptilian rule." Clinton is for Hitchens emblematic of an official Washington overrun with lobbyists, Tammany-bribers, and bagmen of a thousand stripes. But Hitchens doesn't merely knock Clinton down like most polemicists. Instead, he drives over him with an 18-wheel Peterbilt, shifts gears to reverse, and then flattens the reputation of the Arkansas "boy wonder" again and again. Anyone who gets misty-eyed when Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," the Clinton theme song, comes on the radio shouldn't read this exposé. Hitchens's eternal scorn, which, since his death from esophageal cancer in 2011, is resounding louder than ever with a thunderously appreciative reading public. In the post-Cold War era, Hitchens was the polemicist who mattered most. He understood better than anyone that today's news is tomorrow's history. Everyone knows the wit and wisdom of Dorothy Parker and Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Like these esteemed literary predecessors, Hitchens will be anthologized and read for years to come. Three versions of Clinton's impeachment drama (maybe more to come) will remain essential: Clinton's own My Life, Kenneth Starr's Official Report of the Independent Counsel's Investigation of the President, and Hitchens's No One Left to Lie To. Hopefully Hitchens's book will continue to be read in journalism and history classes, not for its nitty-gritty anti-Clinton invective and switchblade putdowns, but to remind politicians that there are still reporters out there who will expose your most sordid shenanigans with a shit-rain of honest ridicule. Hitchens salutes a few of them'Jamin Raskin, Marc Cooper, and Graydon Carter among them'in these pages...This outstanding, gutsy journalists, defying the current journalistic trend to rather cover up a lie than to stand up for the readers (and voters) - which is also addressed in the book, delivers an exposé in graceful, eloquent, tasteful prose, with an intellectual and philosophical touch. There's nothing cheesy or cheap about this book. Hitchens is no gossip-monger. He is a professional, courageous journalist on a quest to balance the scales of history. Hitchens can well be regarded as one of the last journalists to stand up and defend the readers and voters of the world against the spin-machines of ruthless politicians. He heard the voices of the working classes whose slogan till today is Taxation without representation. He was as popular with the Left as with the Right. Needless to say, this is my kind of book. And yes, my kind of author. This is the kind of journalism I want to read. We all should insist on it.