Hillary Clinton is finally facing the sniper fire she “imagined” she caught in Bosnia as First Lady. Roger Stone’s The Clintons’ War on Women was released Tuesday, on the day Hillary finally had to debate the other Democratic candidates — an ordeal the Democratic National Committee and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have tried to spare her.
The book recounts the stories of about two dozen women, beginning with one of Bill Clinton’s college classmates, who have stepped forward to claim that President Clinton sexually assaulted them. Some of the women received settlements of hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them claim to have had their pets killed, their jobs terminated, their businesses audited by the IRS, their tires slashed, or to have received odd phone calls or queries from strange bypassing joggers about the health of their children.
That’s just the first 100 pages of the book, which with footnotes and bibliography runs to almost 500 pages. That only brings us up through Bill Clinton being elected president, and doesn’t even get us to Monica Lewinsky. Nor to Stone’s narrative on Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, who he argues are also at war against women. Nor to tales of drug sales, money laundering, and other chicanery.
But it does raise a question: what kind of sociopath would actually have a child by a serial rapist? Or even by someone who seems to be routinely accused of sexual assaults?
According to Stone, not Hillary Clinton. Chelsea Clinton is not Bill Clinton’s child, and has had extensive plastic surgery, both to make herself more attractive (were any First Children other than the Fords ever good looking?) and to make herself less the spitting image of her real dad, Web Hubbell. Stone’s co-author Robert Morrow asked Chelsea Clinton about this at a book signing this week. (Chelsea calmly answered him and is now being praised even by Hillary critics like Sean Hannity.)
But Hillary is implicated in the huge apparatus to manage and clean up Bill’s “messes,” something alluded to in the book and movie Primary Colors. Beginning with Arkansas state troopers who hushed up Clinton’s crimes when he was Governor, reported by then-conservative journalist David Brock. (It’s funny to watch “progressives” like the New York Times Frank Rich argue that powerful people don’t use the police to persecute little people who might threaten their rise to power, in a year when the same “progressives” lionize the BlackLivesMatter movement that claims police routinely abuse the powerless.) Bill Clinton’s sexual appetites seem to require a staff to manage: volunteers, interns, and employees to be the objects of his lust; state troopers, White House lawyers, and PR flaks to pay off, intimidate, and smear them if they go public; and post-Presidency, billionaire friend Jeffery Epstein to provide young girls on private jets to secluded estates in the Virgin Islands.
Coincidentally, about 14 years ago I went to a fundraiser for gay and lesbian Democrats thrown at the Georgetown home of a Clinton appointee. Bill Clinton had crowed about how he appointed more LGBT people than any president ever had, including Bruce Lehman, the first openly gay Assistant Secretary confirmed by the Senate, James Hormel, the first gay Ambassador, and Bob Hattoy, the first AIDS victim to speak at a Democratic National Convention. At the time I traveled socially with the LGBT Democratic crowd, selling some Clinton political appointees and staffers houses, and becoming close friends with mainly several of the lesbian LGBT Democrats.
The day after this particular fundraiser, an oddly affect-less bespectacled woman, the executive assistant to the Clinton appointee hosting the festivities, who had been at the event, called to ask if I would be available to go out with Mr. Appointee. I replied that if he managed to call me himself I would give him an answer. That may have been too uppity a reply, as I never got that call. I now wonder if not being able to manage your own social life without a staff was part of the Clinton regime’s culture. As we know from her emails, Hillary can’t drive, is unable to figure out a fax machine or an Ipad, and doesn’t know how to read TV guide. So perhaps like Hillary, Bill really needed assistance to manage his affairs.)
It’s a fascinating book about an unseemly topic. Stone (and co-author Robert Morrow) mention Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash as a companion volume; Stone says he is covering the non-financial crimes of the Clintons. Some fans of Schweizer’s book will no doubt think Stone is muddying the water with the Clinton’s un-drycleaned laundry. But Stone details how many courtiers cover up for the Clintons just to advance their careers, and how many major networks and national journalists have shelved or delayed stories about the women Bill is alleged to have assaulted and Hillary is alleged to have threatened, until after various elections or impeachment trials had been decided. So perhaps it’s really more a companion volume to Marc Leibovich’s fantastic book on D.C.’s political class, This Town. Maybe This Town: After Dark.