Ghosts and spectres

Last week was notable for the fuss made about the imminent publication of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs, but former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, writing in the Daily Telegraph, had a theory: while there might be speculations as to whether the memoir was ghosted, "large segments of The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal seem to have been ghosted by Hillary". If you want to know "what Hillary Clinton is really like," he said, "don't read her book. Read Sidney's."

The really sad thing about it, added Morris, is that the title refers not to the wars on terror, drugs, crime or even poverty... but to "the War against Kenneth Starr, the War Against the Republican Impeachment Committee, the War against Paula Jones..." It all amounted, he decided, to "an 800-page job application for a post in Hillary's Administration".

"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking halfwits who get fleeced... by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?" "Ah yes: here we go again, and again, and again," said the Independent's Charles Shaar Murray, quoting from Hunter S Thompson's latest, a miscellany-cum-memoir. "Kingdom of Fear carries all the hallmarks of classic Thompson except the evidence of genius at work." "[E]ven his gift for ingenious invective seems diminished, and anybody who can't come up with some decent invective when confronted with the spectacle of Dubya... should yield his throne to Michael Moore".

"On the whole, events have defeated me," wrote Philip Hensher in the Spectator, citing AT Wilson, "and it stands as a motto for the whole history of attempted western intervention in the [Middle East]". In John Keay's Sowing the Wind, a "sweeping, breathless, but always entertaining study" of those interventions, he was surprised to learn of "the abrupt creation, in 1920, of a nation called Moab, which... found itself with a 23-year-old British subaltern... as president". He was less surprised to hear Churchill protest that the "idea that HMG... faced all the expenses and burdened themselves with all the military risks and exactions in order to secure some advantage in regard to some oilfields is too absurd for acceptance". "Plus ça change," said Hensher, "plus c'est la même chose."

Most popular