The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President

Cover of The Truth About Hillary.

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The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President (ISBN 1595230068) is an Orwellianly named 2005 book about Hillary Clinton by Edward Klein which has since become infamous for its combination of rumor mongering and frankly bizarre and disgusting claims about the Clinton family. Highlights include:

• Claiming that Bill Clinton raped Hillary when the two conceived Chelsea. It also throws out the typical right-wing claim that Clinton had raped Juanita Broaddrick, despite Broaddrick recanting the claim while under oath, with the added claim that Hillary knew about it and doesn't care.
• Repeating the long debunked claim that President Clinton "held up air traffic at Los Angeles Airport while he got a $200 haircut."
• Saying that Hillary "only had herself to blame for the talk about her sex life" because "most women, faced with a chronically unfaithful husband like Bill Clinton, would have divorced him long ago." Never mind the possibility that the two could be in an open marriage (which seems likely given Klein claims that neither Bill nor Hillary are monogamous), this justification of speculating about Hillary's private life just comes off as distasteful.

When your anti-Hillary Clinton book is too much for Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly you know you've fucked up big time.

Anonymous sources

A review of the book done by Media Matters For America shortly after its release noted that "more than 70 footnotes refer to unnamed sources." Mind you, this is not an issue on its own — Deep Throat, of All The President's Men fame, was totally anonymous, for example. However, both Woodward and Bernstein had a decent amount of trust due to their claims being backed up with actual evidence, and the same cannot be said about Klein. More often than not, it feels like he's using "anonymous source" as an excuse to not actually have to name a name, because said person could be revealed to be either full of shit, misrepresented, or entirely fabricated.

For example, the claim mentioned above about Bill raping Hillary is cited to "an anonymous source who was with the Clintons in Bermuda." At another point, a claim about Hillary's medical record, specifically that "Hillary had contracted an obstetrical infection, which was serious enough to damage the lymphatic vessels carrying excess fluid from her legs back into central circulation," is cited to "an anonymous medical authority." Several of these sources appear to lack "firsthand or even secondhand information."

Mind you, according to Klein many of these sources asked to be anonymous because they were "fearing Hillary's power to exact retribution." However, with how specific many of these claims, the idea that the Clinton's would not be able to figure out who they came from--assuming they were actually true--is downright absurd. Going back to Watergate, Richard Nixon did suspect that Mark Felt was Deep Throat at the time. In the same regard, it is absurd to believe that the Clinton family wouldn't be able to remember who they told--oh I don't know, that Chelsea was conceived out of rape or that Hillary suffers from a rather serious medical condition too.

For a more direct comparison, take a look at Primary Colors, the 1996 novel about Clinton's 1992 campaign which was published anonymously. A combination of writing style and references to insider information caused Joe Klein (no relation), the book's author, to be figured out within six months. Yet, Klein wants us to believe that a doctor can give private information about Hillary and nobody will be able to figure out who they are? It just doesn't make any sense.

Every rumor about Hillary Clinton is true

“”A muckraking new book about Hillary Clinton says she is influenced by a culture of lesbianism, had an affair of her own, but is also asexual.

One of the strangest things about the book is how it managed to buy into every single rumor about Hillary Clinton of that time, regardless of how much sense they actually made when put together. "Klein seems confused about which tired, old Clinton smear he wants to repeat; unable to decide, he tosses them all into the mix, resulting in a bilious stew of contradictory claims," writes Media Matters. For example, at one point in the book, Klein acts "Obsessed by his fantasies of Mrs. Clinton as a lesbian." (One of the reasons he gives to support this is that "many of her closest friends and aides were lesbians." Never mind the fact that he shows no evidence to support this notion, nor does he explain why it's impossible that Hillary, in spite of not being a lesbian herself, is perfectly fine hanging around lesbians. Fuck, if you want to go down that road, the person she was closest with during the Clinton Administration was — well, her husband, and nobody has ever claimed Bill is anything but heterosexual.) However, even though he just wrote about Hillary being a lesbian, Klein will also write that "Vince [Foster] and Hillary had been lovers" in spite of the fact that Vince Foster was very much a man.

It is quite telling that the only thing consistent about Hillary in this book is how everything, regardless of how large it is, is in some way fodder for Klein's rumor-mill. Regarding a conversation Hillary had with her then-boyfriend, Klein wrote that it "might have been a substitute for an honest discussion about Hillary's sexual frigidity." It very well might have been, just as it might have been a substitute for an honest discussion about literally anything. However, Klein gives us no reason to believe this is the case, meaning his statement is basically meaningless.

Mind you, the book attempts to make the point that Clinton has "many contradictions and deceptions" according to its cover sheet. However, the book never actually does anything with all these contradictions that it brings up. Instead, it just gets contradictory narratives and seems to hope the average reader doesn't notice. This is not helped by the fact that many of these claims, including every claim about Hillary's secret sex life, aren't actually backed up with things Clinton has said, instead it seems like Klein bases his impression of Clinton off of general vibes and nothing more. He writes that "she was a mother, but she wasn't maternal" and "she was a wife, but had no wifely instincts." However, what it means to be those qualities is never explained in any detail, nor is it elaborated on regarding how exactly Hillary lacks them.

See also

• Badger's law