Opinion

SMEAR FOR PROFIT – NEW HILLARY “BIO” IS JUST TRASH

ON page 202 of his new tome – just out yesterday – Ed Klein writes, “Greed seemed to be the only explanation for the outlandish book deal.” Klein is referring to the $8 million advance Hillary Clinton received for her autobiography.

These are curious words to be publishing in 2005, when Klein and the world know that her book “Living History” was a phenomenal success and has earned its author more than the $8 million in royalty payments advanced to her.

Curious and revealing. Because if any book in recent memory reads as though it has been written out of greed – a greedy hunger to separate millions of conservative book buyers from their hard-earned 25 bucks – it is Ed Klein’s “The Truth About Hillary.”

This is one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn’t have to suffer through another word.

Though Klein suggests in his subtitle that he has written a study of a power-hungry politician – “What She Knew, When She Knew It, And How Far She’ll Go to Become President” – he’s produced something quite different. An unduly celebratory biography is called a “hagiography.” Klein’s book is a “hate-eography.”

Despite a distinguished journalistic pedigree including stints as the editor of both Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, Klein has chosen to emulate the works of the highly dubious bio-defamer Charles Higham, who with the slimmest of evidence wrote books claiming that Errol Flynn was a gay Nazi spy and Howard Hughes was a bisexual.

Klein may offer a few words here or there about Whitewater or Travelgate, but what really floats his boat is the Higham-like notion that Sen. Clinton is secretly a lesbian.

He has no proof whatever for this claim save that she has had some lesbian friends. (So do I. Does that make me a lesbian?) Indeed, Klein even offers the quaint theory that it doesn’t really matter whether Hillary ever acted on her supposed lesbian tendencies. “To be a lesbian,” he lectures on page 63, “it was not necessary for a woman to have a physical relationship with another woman. Such a relationship could be romantic and asexual.”

He quotes someone he says is an unnamed college classmate of Hillary’s, who claims that “the notion of a woman being a lesbian was fascinating to Hillary . . . But she was much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement than a sexual practice . . . Hillary talked about it a lot, read lesbian literature, and embraced it as a revolutionary concept.”

Oh, really. Let’s see. It’s June 2005. Hillary Clinton has been a major public figure in the United States for nearly 15 years. Somehow I imagine that if, indeed, she had “embraced” lesbianism “as a revolutionary concept” during her college years – years that have been written about exhaustively – we would have heard about it before now.

We also probably would have heard by now that Bill Clinton learned Hillary was pregnant with Chelsea by reading about it in an Arkansas newspaper. This detail is offered up by a single source – an “investment banker from New York” – in the course of a story about how Bill “raped” Hillary while on vacation in Bermuda in 1979.

Everything in this book that matters has been written before, and better. Everything else in it shouldn’t have been published.