Rating: 
Summary: Conspiracy against us
Review: This is an alarming book that should serve as a warning to all small and large "d" democrats. The authors' superb documentation of the cabal of crooks, crazies, and conspirators that sought to undermine Clinton's presidency should remind all of us of the fragility of our democracy.The use of straight-forward narrative combined with hard facts proves the power of good journalistic work. The inablility of the authors' critics to sight any significant degree of specifics in the negative reviews serves as proof to this point. Many people have missed the point of the attempted coup. The "coup" was not against Clinton. Clinton's presidency was the result of the electoral process. Clinton's enemies, with the help of the House of Representatives, sought to usurp this process against the will of the people. The coup attempt was Congress's attempt to undermine the electorate's role in the Presidential selection process. They sought not only to remove Clinton, but to so lower the barriers to impeachment that subsequent elections would be meaningless or continually at high risk. This book reminds us that it was not the critical eye of the press that stopped this plot the were at times seemingly complicit. (In fairness Gene and Joe had written countless articles and Gene had written a book cautioning us about this.) It was the American people who seemed the only group capable of determining what the framers had in mind. Perhaps that is why the first three words in the constitution's preamble are "WE THE PEOPLE"
Rating:
Summary: This important book will make you mad, and it should
Review: I have watched this American travesty play out my local papers and from 'the word on the street.' As an politically independent Arkansan fortunate enough to read Gene Lyons Wednesday column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I have been getting bits and pieces of this book for about six years. Finally, Lyons and Conason have pulled it all together and meticulously debunked every Repubican, New York Times, Wall St. Journal, and other psuedo-journalistic lie (and occasionaly one-quarter truth) and diatribe about 'Whitewater' (whatever that was) and the Clintons. Bill Clinton was a marked man by the Republican hitmen from Day One. His election was the worst thing to ever happen to Arkansas because of the damage done to its people and institutions for the political hate and wants of venal people in Arkansas and anywhere else in America who hated Clinton, and it really had nothing to do with anything he did wrong. It was just because he was a Democrat capable of being elected and outwitting Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk. The Republicans and far right power brokers were determined to destroy him and anybody who dared to be allied with him. And Kenneth Starr? He got appointed by Republican judges because of an alleged conflict of interest of Robert Fiske. Fiske, however, was truly an 'Independent Counsel,' and that is the last thing the Republicans wanted. If the same conflict standard was applied to Starr, he would have been removed in six weeks. But no, and this tells you why the Republicans would ignore a Starr conflict because he was more than willing to be their willing whore. He had his marching orders, and his 'ethics' were subordinate to his moral imperative to the far right to ignore reality and truth and destroy Clinton by any means necessary. The Repubican House members applauding his presentation in the House Judiciary (Impeachment) Committee is burned in my memory, and it still makes me ill. This book is an extremely ugly potrait of American politics at its worst. This book will make you sick about our system and make you wonder whether the dynamics of Presidential (and maybe Congressional) politics has forever changed. I fear that it has. If Al Gore gets elected President, he can expect the same treatment. If George Bush gets elected, I hope he gets the same treatment because the Republicans deserve it, even if Bush doesn't. (In Arkansas we say: 'What goes around, comes around.') This book shows that the only difference between 1990s America and some banana republic is that the assassins don't murder; they just destroy lives, reputations, and careers, and they derive sadistic pleasure from it. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ben Franklin, and their friends are looking down weeping for what their system of government has become. Since we have lived this travesy of politics and justice, we should be mad as hell. I have been for years. Now we can all see the details of the dishonesty of everyone involved.
Rating:
Summary: Conason & Lyons expose a half-vast right-wing cabal
Review: This meticulously sourced and researched book describes the activities of the multifaceted 'Get Clinton' campaign of the past ten years. If you aren't already outraged by how Clinton has been treated by Congress, the Office of Independent Counsel, the mainstream media, and well-financed conservative activists you will be after reading The Hunting of the President. Would you be surprised to know that Ken Starr was delving into Clinton's sex life long before Lewinsky appeared on the scene? That the New York Times got the Whitewater story wrong from start to finish? That there are numerous connections that clearly betray the partisanship of Starr and his OIC cohort? That Linda Tripp is not "just like you," she was conspiring to get rich from a Clinton tell-all book? Conason and Lyons describe these things, as well as a mind-boggling array of duplicity, connivance, and avarice on the part of those who sought to destroy Clinton and remove him from office. In this text the authors have composed a complex series of events over a long period of time into a clear and compelling narrative. Their excellent writing, research, and investigation stand as a stunning indictment of the motivations and actions of the anti-Clinton cabal.
Rating:
Summary: Recipe for a Coup
Review: In America, we like to think that we live in "a free country". After reading The Hunting of The President, that belief may waver. The amazing thing is not that such a distasteful collection of rogues, racists and reprobates could mount an attack on the duly elected President of the United States. The amazing, and terrifying thing is how nearly they succeeded in having him removed from office. The American people think they know about Whitewater, Filegate and the other tempests in a teapot that we associate with this presidency. Lyons and Conason show, by their meticulously documented reporting, that much of our knowledge is nothing but the lies and half truths we have been fed by reporters, hungry for bylines above the fold on page one. THOTP is a book dense with information. It cannot be appreciated in a quick skim. But you will be well rewarded for your persistance in reading carefully. It is a study in the best and worst in humn nature, and that, of course, is endlessly fascinating to all humans.
Rating:
Summary: THOP worth supporting
Review: No book has made me this angry since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Like that story of deception, this expose names the real actors behind the soap opera which played out last year to its sad conclusion. But the kabuki performance continues, and this book is a playbill to the cast of characters. It opens the curtain in Emerald City and shows us the wizard operating the controls. If you wanted to know why the impeachment proceeded to a disgraceful defeat in the Senate, read this book. Buy it to discourage such abuse of process in the future.
Rating:
Summary: A Season of Treason
Review: One refreshing aspect of Conason & Lyons' brilliant work is that by presenting little or no opinion, speculation, or hyperbole, but rather presenting a factual narrative, it is up to the reader to assign "meaning" to the facts. I couldn't help thinking about halfway thru the book that if we really took our constitution and our democracy seriously, there would be more than just a few prominent names who would be answering right now to charges of undermining a popularly elected government by falsity, subterfuge, false documentation, and giving aid and comfort to this nation's enemies by attempting to weaken the executive leader. That to me is treason. Not to mention abject cowardice. A good book makes you think, but a great book makes you act! So I am going to do everything in my power to support bringing these treasonous, hypocritical right wing cowards to a full public accounting for their rather inexcusable actions...At the voting booth.
Rating:
Summary: Tell me lies, tell me right wingers' lies.
Review: The "lone-star" reviews of this book are strident, not factual. They do not accurately communicate the worthiness of this five-star masterpiece. For ten years, as the authors carefully detail, the Right Wing took unjustified liberties with the record, in daily attempts to smear the Clintons'. One example: resurrecting Mena, Arkansas cocaine allegations from the Reagan-Bush era and specifying a date when, supposedly, Clinton operatives made a trip to Colombia to bring back cocaine. "Too bad, Right Wingers!" the authors defend. CNN had a camera crew on that plane on the date in question, to film a documentary about the pilot. CNN's award-winning video footage preserved the plain proof, that the plane did not even leave the USA. So much for the cocaine trafficking allegations against our President! This well-researched book is full of many other similarly simple and persuasive refutations of sham charges against the Clintons'. Only one charge, Monicagate, is left standing in the debris of the authors' careful dissection of the Right Wing's "reindeer games." True, in Monicagate, the President fell, genitalia-first, into the mean-spirited trap of his enemies; he should have known better. But it was, after all, as the authors explain, a trap. As the authors carefully detail, Paula Jones's case was sponsored by the same henchprudes and hypocrites who decided, a decade ago, that avid heterosexuality was and is Bill Clinton's Achilles' heel. Of course, the Jones case was no secret. The President knew about this trap. He utterly failed to comprehend or predict the power of its teeth. In sum, the authors show us a President, reckless in the Lewinsky matter, yet guilty of few, if any, other lapses. His welcomed, adult relationship with Monica, together with his self-defensive denials of the tryst, are virtually the President's only sins. No Filegate. No Whitewatergate. No Vince-Fostergate. No other gates. Just Monicagate. No doubt the authors appear to take the side of the President on most of these other "gates." But the authors do so based on fact, not fiction. One ends this book with the sense that this Administration may indeed have fulfilled its aspiration to be a very ethical administration indeed, particularly if one ranks this President's high marks, in seeking social justice and improvements in the lives of most citizens, as morally and substantially outweighing his weakness for the advances of a thong-snapping intern. Please consider this review as a strong recommendation of this book. And, also, please consider this review as a challenge to any future "lone-star" reviewers. The Clinton-haters are hereby challenged to point to any factual errors in this well-documented refutation of the vile and wanton slanders that have been spread by them from tongue-to-tongue.
Rating:
Summary: Scary!
Review: Before you criticize this book, read it. If the average citizen (of whatever political agenda) is not frightened by the misuse of the judicial and legislative process DOCUMENTED in this sordid tale of a failed coup, then maybe we don't have any light at the end of the democracy tunnel. I hope the facts in this original and well-researched book reach more folks like me, who are(was) unaware of just how far powerful cliques are willing to go to have their own brand of American "democracy". Reading "Silence of the Lambs" was like reading a nursery rhyme compared to the fear I felt as I turned the pages to bear witness to this all-out assault on fairness and justice which was assisted by some of the most respected names(I previously thought) of our "free press". Buy it, but don't read it alone on a dark night.
Rating:
Summary: A Pulitzer, please
Review: Let me have the honor of seconding the Reader from Boca Raton's nomination of this book for a Pulitzer. The book confirms the worst suspicions of the intuitively wise American citizenry--and proves that the Clinton witch hunt was even slimier than we thought it was, and we thought it was incredibly distasteful. This book, first of all, is journalism. Journalism is the discovery of a significant story in a set of facts. We have are not asked to accept as "news" the latest report of gossip from what the media regard as the centers of power. Conason and Lyons find the news and report it. They check it out. They minimize speculation. They editorialize hardly at all. The news is that the slimmer the chance that either the President or First Lady had ever committed a crime, the louder was the cry for a new investigation, the shriller the invective about what they must be hiding. Conason and Lyons gather the facts, find the pattern, report it exhaustively and entertainingly, and have made it possible for future hisorians to discover what was really going on. Commentary will be added to the story the authors have to tell, but little of real significance.
Rating:
Summary: A CANCER ON THE JUDICIARY
Review: THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT documents a sickness at the very center of this nation's soul. A few people, convinced of their exclusive ownership of the truth, proved willing to tell any lie, despoil our nation's institutions and traditions, and break laws in order to displace from power a man they hated. The assault on the president is a challenge as serious as Watergate to our nation's ability to self-government, but in this case, the cancer is on the judicial system, metastasized to the press and the Congress. THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT shows that the anti-democratic activity originated at very high levels, probably including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, members of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and other officers of the court. These sworn guardians of justice perverted the principles of equity to turn the court system into their instrumentality to grasp political power. For example, the book exposes serious lies in Paula Jones' case, lies at which Judge Susan Wright winked as she judged the president solely guilty of contempt. Also, in the process of using the courts for political purposes, very basic rights guaranteed in our Constitution, including the protections of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, have been damaged. Grand jury secrecy has been turned into a mockery, and reporters turned into informants for the prosecution. The power of money may have been used to buy testimony. The press itself is used not to report news but to influence opinion. These developments are frighteningly similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union as it slid into dictatorship. THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT shows that elected officials are not exempt from blame, either. The shame with which Newt Gingrich, Dan Burton, Alfonse D'Amato, Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth covered themselves is well-known, but even sadder is the participation in misdeeds by nominally independent and fair-minded Republicans such as Jim Leach. Leach used his congressional position and committee chairmanship to let now-exposed liars spin fables about Mena and Madison Guaranty. Will Leach and others ever accept that they have done terrible damage to our democratic republic and repair the breach they have opened? THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT also traces how a vast web of tax-exempt foundations (e.g., Coors, e.g., Bradley) are routinely used for partisan purposes, thereby effectively siphoning money from the Treasury, combining it with private wealth from men like Scaife and using it to betray democracy. Saddest of all, THE HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT shows that the name of Jesus Christ has been used to spread slanders and false testimony by televangelists like Jerry Falwell and false messiahs like Sun Myung Moon. The answer to Counsel Welch's question to the extremists exemplified in Senator Joe McCarthy, "Have you at last no shame, sir?" has been answered by THE HUNTING. We now know that these extremists have no shame. An always-vigilant citizenry, dedicated to fairness and openness of process, is the only defense against them.
|
