Okay, from the sublime to the ridiculous. As I reported earlier this afternoon, the Pentagon’s transcript of the Vanity Fair interview between Sam Tanenhaus and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz seems to have left out at least one key exchange.
That’s the sublime.
Now to the ridiculous.
Rush Limbaugh has a blurb up on his website that says you can debunk Hillary’s new book with passages from Sid Blumenthal’s new book — a sort of inverted harmonic convergence of Clinton-hating, you might say.
Limbaugh writes that Hillary’s claims to be the last one to know are bogus, as are her claims to any estrangement after Bill’s confession. Everything was staged …
Sydney Blumenthal’s book blows Hillary’s out of the water. He writes that Bill called him after his Lewinsky grand jury testimony to see what he thought of it. Next, Hillary picked up the phone followed by James Carville.
Sydney heard Hillary and Bill talking in the background, and rejoiced that they were “still working together.” They managed the entire scene at that time, pretending to be estranged. How many times did we see this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo (below) of the first family and dog departing for the Vineyard the day after Bill testified, with Chelsea between them and Hillary off to the side?
Yet Blumenthal says that Mrs. Clinton was in on the strategy, not giving her husband “the silent treatment” as we were told. This disagrees with Mrs. Clinton saying in her book that Buddy the dog came along to keep Bill company, since he’s the only one who would. I have to feel sorry for the Democratic presidential nominees today, because this book is the only story out there!
As you might expect, this is rather misleading spin. He even gets the quotes wrong. Blumenthal explicitly says he never talked to Hillary about her emotions or feelings or what was happening between her and her husband. This is his description (p. 461) of his first contact with Hillary after the president’s admission …
I called Hillary. We dispensed with the extraordinarily difficult personal problem at the start. As her friend, I wanted to respect her privacy. I said that whatever “issues” anyone had, and hers was worse than anyone’s, we had to think about the politics. That was her reasoning as well. She said that the President would be “embarrassed,” but that was for him to deal with. And that was all she said about it.
What follows this passage is an uncomfortable description not only of Hillary’s feelings of personal betrayal but of her humiliation and chagrin at having defended her husband against charges she now understood to be true. Four pages later Blumenthal describes talking by telephone to Clinton, then Hillary, then Carville and Mark Penn after the president’s speech to the country. While talking to Penn he says …
I could hear the President and Hillary bantering in the background. Whatever they would have to do between themselves to get over this episode, in the challenge to their marriage and the presidency they were still working as a team. Without that, nothing was possible.
Now that I think about it, would anyone really trust Rush Limbaugh on something like this? Doesn’t one go to Rush for Vince Voster and the Temple of Doom sorta things? In any case, next back to why passages seem to have been scrubbed from the Pentagon’s Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz transcript.
