OPINION:
Did any of the political cognoscenti consult Real Clear Politics last Thursday? Those who did found that Donald Trump’s recent charges that Hillary Clinton was for years her husband’s “enabler” while committing “very seedy” behavior is irrefutable. Moreover, the evidence is contained in a book that has been right under our noses for years. The book was written by David Brock — now a Hillary champion — and Mr. Brock is still quite proud of the book. He actually has boasted that, “reviewers had found [the book] to be fair, well-balanced and accurate” — such reviewers as The Washington Post and The New York Times. Why no one has consulted it is mysterious. Is the press really that lazy?
Its evidence is as overwhelming as the book’s author is problematic for the Clintons. Mr. Brock now oversees Media Matters with an annual budget of millions of dollars, and its main purpose is to protect the Clintons. Yet what about the book he wrote? Could the Clintons have not read it? Did their vast research operation overlook it? Are the Clintons that amateurish? It is my humble opinion that they are, and if the American people elect her president we shall be right back with them in the 1990s.
The Real Clear Politics piece of last week was written by a writer equally as irrefutable as Mr. Brock’s book. After all, he helped Mr. Brock put it together. His name is Mark Paoletta, and he helped Mr. Brock on many projects in the mid-1990s, including “Troopergate,” “The Real Anita Hill,” and this damaging book, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.” Mr. Paoletta was considered by Mr. Brock to be a friend. Yet that apparently has changed. Mr. Paoletta now is substantiating Mr. Trump’s charges that Bill has been a major abuser of women for many years, and Hillary has led the campaign to cover up his philandering and to vilify the women involved.
Sometimes she played very dirty, indeed. On Page 277 of “Seduction,” Mr. Brock cites approvingly Garry Wills as saying, “Apologizing for and covering up Clinton’s womanizing all those years, Wills suggested, had instilled in Hillary a deep suspicion of the press and contempt for the democratic process itself.” So that is the background for Hillary’s machinations. What exactly were they? According to Mr. Brock, during the 1992 campaign, Hillary was “fighting behind the scenes to keep the press from exposing the unseemly aspects of life with her husband . The shadow campaign apparatus involved Hillary’s lawyer friends to combat womanizing stories . In this respect, anyway, the Clintons were indeed a second coming of Camelot: Not since the Kennedys had there been so many retainers on hand whose primary function appeared to be to keep a lid on all manner of personal scandals.” Mr. Brock goes on to say on Page 271 that “It was Bill’s womanizing that had turned their personal life into tabloid fodder . [G]iven Bill’s personal history and character, Hillary and her team had to treat [all charges of Bill’s pathological behavior] as potentially true.”
Hillary’s ruthlessness knew no bounds. On Page 272, Mr. Brock quotes Rex Nelson, formerly political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, as recalling, “Women were called and told they’d make them look like whores if they came forward.” At about this time, Hillary began hiring private investigators such as Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano (who has since been safely interred in a federal prison) to push back against what Clinton aide Betsey Wright called “bimbo eruptions.” Mr. Brock reports on Page 273 that “The use of a private investigators to do surveillance on — and attempt to intimidate — potential witnesses was an unprecedented scandal potentially far darker than the story of the ill-starred Whitewater investments. Yet with the sole exception of The Washington Post story in July, not one of the campaign reporters chose to write about the practice, even though many were quite familiar with it.”
Of course, by now a long line of victims has come forward to tell their stories about adventures with romantic Bill, and in so doing many have told of their fate at the hands of Hillary and her operatives. For instance, Juanita Broaddrick says she was raped by Bill, Kathleen Willey says she was fondled by him within days of her husband’s suicide, to say nothing of Monica Lewinsky. Well, we have all heard about her and what Hillary’s associate Sidney Blumenthal did to her.
Yet all the while this book by a journalist-turned-Clintonista, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,” has been sitting on library shelves, awaiting the curiosity of journalists. Obviously, not many have such curiosity.
Now Mark Paoletta has come forward. Donald Trump has made the book’s contents an issue in his defense against Hillary’s impudent charges of sexism. Let’s see if the press can ignore this, while piling on Bill Cosby.
• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.
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