No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Paperback)

Christopher Hitchens, a man of the Left on most issues, was an exception. No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is his 1999 attack not just on Clinton's policies but also his ethics. Hitchens blasts Clinton for enacting policies that are essentially Republican, such as "welfare reform," which stole from the Republicans a key election issue while stranding the liberals who had no alternative but to stick with the President. Clinton has such a conservative record, Hitchens says, that it's a mystery why so many people on the Right hate him as much as they do (81). The Democrats are used to dissent in their ranks about whether Clinton was liberal enough; after all, a significant number of Democrats in both houses of Congress voted against "welfare reform." But not a single Senate Democrat voted for Clinton's removal, and Hitchens objects strongly to this kind of unconditional Democratic/liberal support for Clinton's behavior. With harsh but witty prose, Hitchens trashes Clinton for his lies and abuses of power throughout his presidency (and earlier). He also attacks the liberals who turned into defenders of Clinton's reprehensible behavior during the Lewinsky affair, such as Arthur Schlesinger (who said "Only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs" (82)), playwright Arthur Miller (who wrote that the impeachment proceedings were literally the moral equivalent of a medieval witch-hunt (50)), and Gore Vidal (who wrote "Boys are meant to squirt as often as possible with as many different partners as possible" (83)). Hitchens also devotes a chapter to that famous intersection of Clinton's public and private life: his bombing of "training camps" in Afghanistan, a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, and many targets in Iraq at the height of the Lewinsky scandal. Hitchens argues convincingly that contrary to the Clinton administration's claims, the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan and the timing of the Iraq attack were almost certainly motivated by Clinton's desire to distract people from the Lewinsky matter.

Like Hitchens' later book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, No One Left to Lie to is a short, devastating attack on a prominent political figure, in which Hitchens makes no attempt to conceal his utter contempt for his target. Unlike The Trial of Henry Kissinger, however, which many on the Right simply dismiss, No One Left to Lie To will appeal to readers in several different areas of the political spectrum. Conservative readers will enjoy reading the usually left-wing Hitchens rip into Clinton as viciously as any right-wing author ever has. Some left-liberal readers will enjoy Hitchens' verbal assault on Clinton's relatively conservative political record. The only readers who may be upset are those liberals and moderates who turned into strident defenders of Clinton's lying, womanizing, and even his policies because they wanted to thwart the Republicans. They may have kept Clinton in power until the end of his term, but they paid for this achievement with their credibility, putting the Left into a "moral and intellectual shambles" (21). No One Left to Lie To is a must-read for anyone who thinks that to criticize Clinton's behavior is necessarily to be a vengeful right-wing nut.

Note, to left-leaning Americans: This book does not argue that Clinton "destroyed the country" from some sort of socially-conservative (i.e., Republican) point of view at all. These are not essays from the pages of The Wall Street Journal by any means. On the contrary, Hitchens testifies that Clinton destroyed American LIBERALISM, from the point of view of a committed socialist, which Hitchens most solidly is. At one point, Hitchens asks why, given the effect he had on both parties, Republicans hate Clinton at all. It is for this reason that this book is an unusual and highly recommendable perspective for anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject, as well as those who have the greatest revulsion.

Hitchens examines Clinton's record of war, his accusations of sexual abuse, his relationship with Dick Morris, his skill at "triangulation", and his relationship with his wife, Hillary. These are not new topics, they have been discussed at great length and in excruciating detail for the last ten years, but Hitchens handles them all with such skill and wit that his compendium deserves reading by even the most jaded partisan or news-weary person.

In a surprisingly brief volume, but one dense with information, Hitchens portrays in precise detail a man beholden to corporate interests, upper-class elitism, and big money influence-peddling. He accuses Clinton of adherence to an agenda which dismantled welfare, cut government regulation, increased the lot of America's wealthy, and did everything an American liberal is purportedly against. Hitchens even uses the Clintons' own words against them in making his case. Most interestingly, be believes Clinton won votes from Republicans because he gave them legislation they wanted, and from Democrats because he gave them the empty symbolism of the White House.

If you are a right-leaning American, you will either delight, or take horror, in the myriad sordid tales, page after page, of a man corrupt to the bone. On the other hand, if you are a left-leaning American, you truly owe it to yourself to read these essays, and ask yourself how the Democrat Party endorsed this man, and how they came to such abuse by him. I have the feeling that if more Democrats read this book, they would be more angry than the thousands of Republicans who already have.

Mr Hitchens has created an unimpeachable journalistic reference, objectively fair, and incisively harsh. Despite partisan arguments of the many who have read it (as well as many who have not!), nothing in his book can be denied, nothing can be disproven, and nothing can be dismissed. There is a true story on every page, confirmed by a glance in any modern source of news information. Even if someone were to accuse Mr Hitchens of subjectivity in some of his stories, or an impure agenda by collecting them all in one place, the simple fact is, there are so many stories inhabiting these pages, it is so thick with them, and Clinton's life is so comprised of them, the matter is out of Hitchens's hands. It comes with the territory. Clinton did, after all, commit the acts Hitchens describes. In any event, the net effect of Hitchens's brief is profound indeed.

As far as the writing itself, Hitchens is highly literate, clearly well-educated, and charmingly erudite, even when pejorating or cursing. He displays an impressive command of the English language, in both vocabulary and idiom, though never unreadably so. This book is a delight to read from cover to cover. Anyone interested in American politics, whether liberal, conservative, or moderate, will find it informative. Most readers will find it equally hilarious and horrific, but all will find it thought-provoking and entertaining.

The problem for readers who don't share Hitchens' left-wing ideals will be that he seems to have contempt for Clinton's "triangulations" only to the extent that they interfere with his own liberal agenda. Such readers will also find his liberal indignation a bit tiresome. Conservatives and libertarians will bristle at reading (yet again) how FDR saved us from capitalism. And I doubt whether hard-working, middle-class Americans of any political bent will share his outrage that New York's welfare system now has the audacity to "require the poor to search for jobs before receiving help" (the heartless bastards!).

The book is worth reading for a dead-on, acid-tongued portrait of a dysfunctional administration, for once by an author who can't be accused of a partisan hatchet job. Still, one can't help wondering if Hitchens' high-powered perception of Clinton's flaws would be so clearly focused if Clinton had pursued the liberal policies that Hitchens supports.