Throughout the Clinton campaign, I’ve had this pang of anger that Barbara Olson couldn’t weigh in on Hillary’s run for the White House. Barbara could see the “Hillary for President” signs. There were too many signs in Hillary’s life pointing in the direction of the Oval Office for herself. Moreover, Barbara knew the Clintons didn’t have it in their blood to disappear from the national political stage.
Barbara Olson, of course, was murdered in the plane en route to California that hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
In her book, “Hell to Pay”, which chronicled Hillary’s pre-Senate political experience and ideology, Barbara wrote:
At one of her lunches with John Robert Starr at Little Rock’s Café Saint Moritz in 1989, there was a lapse in the conversation about Bill’s ambitions for national office. Starr took the opportunity to ask Hillary what she wanted to do. “She leaned toward me,” he recounted, “eyes ablaze, and said in as an intense voice as I have ever heard, ‘I want to run something!’”
Doesn't Lopez run the online portion of National Review? Women who want to "run something" are suspect, right? Ambition is something to be reviled, apparently. Unless you're a Republican, of course.
Olson's book was merely one of many titles spewed out by conservative publishing house Regnery in the 90s, and was never a serious candidate for being "archived" or respected as a book about Hillary Clinton. It was cheap fodder for quickie buys at the bookstore, part of the wingnut welfare that flowed during that time and allowed a small cottage industry to spring up. Hate the Clintons? Here's ANOTHER Regnery book for YOU! Conservative authors wrote so many that one could hardly blame Olson for contributing hers to the pile. Olson is no longer alive to defend herself. She has become a favorite martyr of pundits like Lopez--and the trick is to simply deflect criticism from herself by citing the work of the late author.
Olson concluded her book:
The Clinton years might seem like a long national nightmare of scandal, sleaze, and ruthless acquisition of power. Hillary herself is the link from the excesses of the Watergate staff, to the Whitewater fiasco, to the abuses of executive power, to the defense of her husband’s perjury and obstruction of justice. But now it is Hillary’s turn. The Clinton era is far from over and Hillary’s ambitions far from satisfied.
The problem with that is, we're living the nightmare of the Bush Administration, which is a thousand times worse than any wingnut could imagine under the Clintons. Ten thousand times worse. One could never imagine a President lying to take us to war. One could also never imagine a Presidential spokesman coming forward, hangdog with shame and guilt, to expose the lies that were told, either. We are looking at $4 bucks for a gallon of gas, a permanent presence in Iraq, almost 4,100 dead soldiers, over thirty thousand wounded, over a trillion dollars pissed away, habeas corpus suspended, signing statements that tell Congress to stuff it, runaway debt, runaway spending, incompetence on a scale never before seen in our government, and our ability to defend ourselves shattered because of a broken military.
Lopez is a disgraceful idiot because she can't stop obsessing about the Clintons well after that ship has sailed; her intellectual dishonesty shines through because what word never appears in her column?
"Bush."
Look for a lot of these wingnuts to run from that word.
--WS
