I was a big Clinton supporter. A person who said, I didn't care what he did with his private life as long as he did a good job as President. Yeah, I wished he was less military than he was. Yeah, I wished he hadn't supported DOMA or kowtowed to the military about gays in it, or given up on universal health care, but he was still the best president since Jimmy Carter, and I was proud of the way he boosted the economy. I thought he was generally a pretty good guy.

This book ruined him for me a bit. I still think all those things, but now I know he wasn't really a good guy. He's a rapist, plain and simple. It doesn't negate his accomplishments, or make me wish he'd never been president at all, but it does keep me from wanting to hang up a picture of him in my home that I used to think I would hang up eventually. ( )

"This little book has no `hidden agenda.' It is offered in the most cheerful and open polemical spirit, as an attack on a crooked president and a corrupt and reactionary administration" (1).

So says Christopher Hitchens in the preface. All though it may be the case that the book is cheerful and polemical it is also, I'm afraid to say, fairly clumsy and transparently superficial.

Hitchens begins in the preface with the possibility that Clinton may have impregnated and African American woman during his term as Governor in Arkansas only to drop the implication based on the relevant DNA data. Hitchens has proven nothing here; he has merely introduced what we already know; Clinton's sexual infidelities and callous disregard for his family and other females along the way.

-The majority of this slim book seeks to prove that Clinton in fact raped who was never given a fair hearing. Hitchens more or less accepts her testimony out of hand because he believes she is a good and honorable person and has not "agenda" in making up such dribble. Hmmm....Oh that's right, no one could ever gain anything from being associated in a sex scandal with the President (see Monica's story).

-But there is a deeper problem with this complaint. The president's sexual behavior has nothing to do with the relevant political factors of his leadership and diplomacy. If Clinton is guilty of sexual assault then he should be tried as an ordinary citizen. But Hitchens' evidence is merely from second-hand testimony at best, and at worst it is derived from an awkward transcript of an interview with Al Gore in which he refused to comment.

-The only worth while material in this book is Chapter 5, Clinton's War crimes. In it he discusses Clinton's bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Khartoum in 1998, a clear war crime based on the evidence presented. I urge you to check this book out of the library, skip the sexual babble, and turn to this section as it is one of the view discussions on the topic aside from Noam Chomsky's comments in 9/11, which Hitchens would later blast him for as surprising as that sounds. ( )