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191 of 231 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine, May 31, 2005
Bill Clinton wrote a a bestseller titled My Life; over 1000 pages. Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine is in part about the missing chapters that deal with Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Sally Perdue, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, and Juanita Broaddrick. It is, also, about being a liberal misogynist. Jackson defines "liberal misogynist" as a person who supports women's rights politically yet repeatedly mistreats women personally.
Candace Jackson is a libertarian feminist and an attorney. She graduated from Stanford and Pepperdine Law School and has worked for Judicial Watch. Jackson interviewed the seven women, and may have learned more than has been generally available in the press. Although, I have followed these women closely since there stories became public, I wasn't struck by too much that was new. The pattern in each case seemed to be denial of the woman's claim, trashing the woman's reputation, failing that, intimidation.
What did strike me as new, was her analysis of modern liberalism, which can help us all understand politics better. She has identified seven tenets of liberalism. Here are the first two and you can read the book for the next five:
1. In modern liberalism, political goals justify any political means to achieve them. You can think of gender equality and affirmative action. Which leads to the "greater good theory", namely if any harm "occurs in the pursuit of those two goals, it's worth the suffering...for the greater good."
2. Modern liberalism relies on intermediaries to take care of the unpleasant tasks of enforcing the means to their political ends.
Most liberals aren't outright socialists demanding government ownership of the economy, but they use legislation and regulation to establish nearly-plenary government control over the economy.
I think the fundamental lesson from the book is that any political philosophy, including liberalism, to the extent that it aligns itself with force to achieve its goals, is a danger to our free choice. It seems the press only wants to scare us about the Republicans and the Patriot Act.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton could be the Democratic candidate for President and is more liberal than Bill Clinton. She is the one person who could have exercised restraint on Bill Clinton, but instead supported his misogyny, and she could turn out worse for us than he. Supporting Hillary Clinton, as much as you want a woman president, is a slap in the face to all women and the goal of gender equality.
(...)
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82 of 100 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Just because I could", June 21, 2005
Monica Lewinsky. Juanita Broaddrick. Paula Jones. Kathleen Willey. Gennifer Flowers. These are just a few of the names instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the indignities of the Clinton years. These women, of course, represent the most notable marital indiscretions committed by our esteemed forty-second president of the United States, but there are many, many other names. Like Elizabeth Ward Gracen and Sally Perdue, two other women closely examined in Candice Jackson's devastating book "Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine." Forget about the financial wheeling and dealing behind the Whitewater fiasco. Forget about Hillary Clinton's jackpot in the cattle market. Forget about the bizarre Vince Foster imbroglio. You may even forget about Travelgate, Filegate, and the billion other scandals that plagued the Clinton regime from the moment these two walked through the White House's front door to the moment they stole anything they could get their hands on when leaving in January 2001. The scandalous behavior documented in this book is far worse. Not that these other issues don't matter. They do. But to truly understand the moral vacuity of Clinton and his wife, you've got to look at how they treated women. And here it is.
Jackson, an economics major at Stanford and a Pepperdine law graduate, wrote this book for several reasons. One, she experienced a situation not unlike that faced by Juanita Broaddrick's encounter with then Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978. Two, the author wanted to show how liberal ideology influenced and reinforced Slick Willie's already well developed misogyny. And three, the book convincingly argues that the American public, confronted with serial infidelity by Bill Clinton, ought to think long and hard about sending Hillary to the White House. This is a woman, contends the author, who enabled her husband's scurrilous behavior, a self-proclaimed feminist whose lust for power overshadowed the very real concerns she should have expressed about Bill's behavior. Through a methodical examination of these seven women's stories, Jackson pulls few punches in describing the breathtaking abuse of power engaged in by the Clinton administration. The dissembling is here all right, those public statements disavowing any knowledge of these claims churned out by the hacks in the White House, but we also learn of more ominous machinations. Threats delivered to women over the telephone, investigations into their backgrounds, "sudden" IRS audits, and even goons hired by Clinton's cronies showing up in person to intimidate the accusers.
By far the most relevant sections of the book discuss how liberal ideology buttressed Clinton's shenanigans. Jackson is an admitted libertarian feminist--which means she supports extremely limited government, tolerance for other views, and the supreme sanctity of civil liberties--so it's not surprising that her political beliefs pop up quite frequently in the book. In fact, she often cites libertarian doctrine in order to pose a counterpoint to liberal cosmology. It's a good way to move into a critique of Clintonian depravity. For example, to a libertarian the individual is all-important, the fount of any nation and the unit from which all rights receive reinforcement. A liberal, on the other hand, believes that the group is the most important civic structure. Whether or not you fit naturally into a group is irrelevant to liberals; they aim all of their policies at groups and tend to ignore those who don't fit. Clinton thus could look at his conquests not as a violation of the group, in this case feminist women like NOW or other politically active bodies, but as single women entirely independent of these organizations. In other words, if they aren't associated with a group, their importance diminishes. They don't have to be treated in the same way. Scary, isn't it?
Here's another example. Jackson writes that libertarians support the idea of small, limited government that should devote itself to defense of the nation and not much else. She then explains that liberals--and by extension liberal dogma--promotes the theory of a lumbering, all-powerful government insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives, always by claiming it's taking action because it knows best but always using political force to achieve goals. Nothing new there, right? But how does this apply to Clinton's sordid activities? Easy. In the case of Juanita Broaddrick, the future president believed that forcing a woman to submit to his whims was entirely acceptable. Not only is the point above relevant, i.e. he saw Broaddrick as an individual and not as a member of a politically powerful group, but he also saw himself as a moral liberal entitled to use force to impose his will on others. Perhaps it's a bit difficult to make sense out of what Candice Jackson is trying to say based upon this review since I'm lifting my examples out of chronological order, but the central idea is that certain unmistakably recognizable traits of liberalism enabled, rather than inhibited, Clinton's horrific behavior with women.
We should stand up and applaud Candice Jackson's intelligence, wit, clarity, and even her bravery in writing such a charged book. She's certain to come under attack for her analysis, although the damage the media can inflict is much less than they were capable of ten years ago. I've read dozens of books about both Clintons, and this is by far one of the most insightful. It's incumbent on all of us, I think, to become more aware of what went on during the 1990s if we wish to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. I don't think she'll win thanks to the detritus she's accumulated over the years, but one never knows. If we can keep books like Candice Jackson's in front of the public, the chances of a repeat of the Clinton years should remain where they belong: near zero.
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46 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clinton abused women while suporting equal rights, July 5, 2005
Author Candice Jackson does not necessarily believe that Bill Clinton should have been impeached but, for the sake of history, she wants to clear the record about his abuse of women. Their were two types of abuse. First, in consensual affairs, such as Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, the Clinton machine would trash and even intimidate women who went public about their affair. Secondly, there were the instances of actual harrassment, sexual attack and even rape. Of course the two types of abuse were not mutually exclusive since the Clinton machine used intimidation tactics on Kathleen Willey to keep her quiet about a sexual attack that took place near the Oval Office. It is well documented that Paula Jones, who alleged harassment when then governor Clinton exposed himself to her, was smeared as trailer trash. The worst case of physical abuse was when, as attorney general of Arkansas, Clinton actually raped Juanita Broaddrick. Jackson looks at the evidence and presents a compelling case that the allegations of rape are true.
This book contains an analysis of the political mindset of liberalism which could justify, or at least look the other way, when this abuse was going on. Jackson sees liberalism as more concerned with the group than with individuals. Therefore, if women's rights to abortions were being protected by Clinton, individual women who alleged that they were attacked or who went public with consensual affairs were expendable.
Jackson has no political ax to grind. She is a libertarian so, although she disagrees politically with some of the liberal policies of the Clinton admisnistration, she agrees with many other policies such as individual choice in abortion. However, her research revealed that Clinton is a misogynist and that while being a champion of women's rights politically, he abused women in his individual relations with them. All too often, the feminist movement were partners with Clinton since it viewed political gains as more important than his individual behavior towards women.
Again, Jackson is not on a high horse arguing that Clinton should have been impeached and convicted. Rather, she feels that he failed to fully discuss his relationship with women in his memoirs and that these issues need to be discussed. She also suggests that Hillary Clinton was something of an enabler and, therefore, we might want to take a serious look at the possibility of another Clinton presidency. I highly recommend this book
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