O Lord, O Lord, the new books on Hillary Clinton sure seem... as excruciating as you'd expect. Get a load of this:
Unlike many harsh books about Clinton written by ideological enemies, the two new volumes come from long-established writers backed by major publishing houses and could be harder to dismiss.... Gerth and Von Natta have spent years as investigative reporters for the New York Times.
Uh-huh. Jeff Gerth. If you're not familiar with the man's work, follow that link and play around a while. The basic point though is that Gerth has spent years as an investigative reporter for the NYTimes swallowing and then spewing all sorts of ridiculous bullshit about Bill and Hillary Clinton, most of it from some pretty dodgy sources.
And based on the WaPo report on the new Hillary book... well, let's just say it does not inspire confidence, to say the least:
Gerth and Van Natta's 416-page book... explores Clinton's time in the Senate in greater depth and portrays her legislative career and her presidential campaign as parts of a broad, long-term plan for power that has its roots in the early 1970s.
According to Gerth and Van Natta, even before the Clintons were married they formulated a "secret pact of ambition" aimed at reinventing the Democratic Party and getting to the White House. The authors cite a former Bill Clinton girlfriend, Marla Crider, who said she saw a letter on his desk written by Hillary Clinton, outlining the couple's long-term ambitions, which they called their "twenty-year project."
Got that? The book apparently takes as its hook a "plan for power" dating from the 1970s, and the source for this information is a "former girlfriend" who saw the letter left on the desk of... Clinton's wife. Right. But it gets better:
Crider was first quoted about the letter in a book by a former National Enquirer reporter in 2000, at the time describing it as more about Bill Clinton's infidelities and the "little girls" he had. Gerth and Van Natta, however, report that they re-interviewed Crider and that she said the earlier book's account was "not totally accurate." In this telling, Crider described the note as being more about the couple's political plans, with little discussion of their personal relationship.
Oh come on. The technical term here is "this is a load of crap."
I'm not a Hillary partisan. But please. This is absurd. If I dread anything more than the resurgence of the "ideologically-driven" (and avarice-driven) anti-Clinton bullshit, I dread the return of the way such bullshit was gobbled up by a lazy "MSM" press -- thereby legitimatizing it. In the 90s Gerth was a fine one for turning bullshit into manure, as it were, and spreading it far and wide. And apparently he's still cheerfully hoeing.