Author: Ellen

As Clinton officially launches her 2016 presidential campaign on June 13, THR highlights the famous faces who have thrown their support behind the former secretary of state.

The Hollywood Reporter   10/30/2013

The Republican plan to defeat Hillary Clinton is doomed. It’s time to go easy on her.

Politico Magazine   6/7/2015   By MATT LATIMER

One has to wonder: When Republicans gathered earlier this year to scheme the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who was the genius who stood up and said, “I know. We’ll challenge the Clintons’ pristine record on ethics. They’ll never see that one coming.”

But of course they did. We all did.

A little newsflash about our past (and probably future) First Family, who pundits, long predicting the Clintons’ coronation, are now suddenly beginning to count out: Scandal surfing is what they always do. They skip the top of the waves, sometimes even giving the impression they might succumb to them. But they never do.

The Clintons have been sent off to their certain doom more times than Tyrion Lannister. During their last sojourn on Pennsylvania Avenue, operators all but installed a new message on the White House switchboard, “If you’re calling with a subpoena for the Clintons, please press 7 now.”

Yet whatever the storm—from blue dresses to funny money from China to an actual impeachment trial—Bill and Hillary are this generation’s Six-Million Dollar Man (and Woman). They always rebuild faster, stronger, and a hell of a lot richer than ever.

Much is now being made of a CNN poll finding that a majority of Americans—57 percent—do not believe Hillary Clinton is honest or trustworthy.  But is that really news? Roughly half of the country has felt that way for a long time.  Forty-three percent of Americans said that a year ago. And forty-six percent said that back in 2007.

Under the headline, “Hillary Clinton’s honesty problem,” an earnest reporter for The Hill newspaper asks, “Is it possible to win the White House if more than half the electorate thinks you’re dishonest?” Uh, of course, it is, people. The Clintons do this all the time.

Clinton’s margins against her potential Republican contenders is thin, to be sure, but not much different than they have been for months. And, by the way, even in purplish New Hampshire, she’s still beating them all—from Bush to Walker to Rubio. Nationally, CNN has her beating Washington’s favorite Republican, Jeb Bush, by eight points.

If history is any guide, the latest series of Clinton scandals will only end to their advantage. Just like they always do. Indeed, it’s long past time for the GOP to learn this lesson before the Clintons whip them again. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.)

Time and again, it’s the Clintons’ accusers who end up humiliated, run out of town, ruined by sex scandals, or left to write soft-porn memoirs about supposed romantic dalliances that read like a letter to a trashy magazine. (“Dear Penthouse, I can’t believe this happened to me…”)

From the day he announced his candidacy for the White House in 1992, the litany of charges against Bill Clinton never stopped—he was a liar, a draft dodger, an adulterer, he had an illegitimate African-American son. Then-President George H. W. Bush himself made a not-to-subtle claim that Clinton might have had pro-Soviet tendencies while a student at Oxford.

Hillary fared no better; she was an alleged drug runner, a hater of marriage and family run amok, a co-conspirator in homicide. A list of the Clintons’ supposed murder victims is still making the rounds on the Internet—right next to other baffling mysteries, like the Loch Ness monster and the plot line of “Revenge.”

Losing to the Clintons in 1996, a frustrated Bob Dole yelled, “Where’s the outrage?” Of course, he yelled that to the very voters who couldn’t care less about Clinton sleaze. They’d heard it all before—again and again.

The Clintons are often fortunate in their opponents—an assortment of professional prudes and ethical hypocrites who push too hard, who revel in it too much, and who focus not on one charge that might stick but a hundred that go in more directions than a Tolkien novel. Which scandal are we on now? Benghazi? Erased emails? Clinton Cash? The death of Vince Foster? An outrage to be named later?

And have no doubt, lurking somewhere in some GOP strategy room at this very moment is a folder fat with new details on that Ny-Quil of Clinton political scandals, Whitewater.

“What is Whitewater?” asked absolutely no one.

Well, back in 1993, a man named David Hale claimed that back in 1978, two other people named Jim and Susan McDougal and the Clintons got into a land deal in Arkansas and then in 1985 they…. (you can’t possibly still be reading this sentence, can you?). Fear not.  Whitewater will be back to bore you to tears for at least one more election cycle.  At least, we’ll have Caitlyn Jenner’s wardrobe to keep us otherwise occupied.

I suppose it’s possible that this year voters will wipe their hands of the Clintons once and for all and move on to other candidates. Or that someone will finally have footage of Hillary Clinton setting an American flag on fire while smoking a crack pipe at a Nazi appreciation meeting with Kim Jong Un.

But just in case the Republicans actually decide to win an election for a change without waiting for the Clintons to totally implode, a few pointers:

Suggestion #1. Pull a Costanza. In one of Seinfeld’s iconic episodes, George Costanza resolves to do the opposite of every impulse or instinct he’s ever had. As Jerry sagely advises him, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”

For decades, the GOP has virtually knocked over people to run to a microphone with attacks on Bill or Hillary, only to see it blow up in their face. Imagine what independents or persuadable Democrats might think of a GOP nominee who says something completely unexpected about the latest Clinton scandal—something that runs totally opposite of their every instinct. Something like, “You know, it’s easy to pile on the Clintons, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that the media does its job. My focus is on my campaign and my message to the voters, which is blah blah blah.” (Note to candidates: You’ll have to fill in the blah, blah, blah yourselves.)

Suggestion #2. Study Thy Enemy. Has anyone else noticed that Hillary Clinton is suddenly wearing a lot of green? And no, not green like the color of money. Just a vivid, eye-popping, deep hue.

She wore green at her Benghazi hearing and when she went to Iowa right after announcing for president. As Secretary of State, she memorably wore green at a G-12 summit.

I mention this because there is little that the Clintons do, at least in the presidential context, that is unplanned. These are people, after all, who infamously polled where they should vacation.

Hillary Clinton’s team is very proud of their efforts to portray their boss as confident, calm, and soothing—like a pastoral green meadow, perhaps? And Secretary Clinton has hired someone with that very task in mind. That the former diplomat has calmly weathered a deluge of scandals that would drown lesser men (word choice intentional) only bolsters that image. Even now, as her polls numbers droop, she still scores well as a strong leader, far ahead of her rivals. It’s as if the Clinton camp is telling voters, if Hillary has the steel to withstand all of this mess, you can trust her to take on whatever ISIS throws at her.

Maybe GOP candidates might give similar thought to their own demeanor and even their wardrobe. Do they come across to voters as serious, future-oriented, or presidential? Or do they instead favor weird turtlenecks or wear large round glasses that we last saw on our high school science teacher?

Suggestion #3. Out-Clinton the Clintons. Notice what the Clintons do when serious allegations surface. They go out and give speeches. About campaign finance reform. Or juvenile justice reform. The key word, of course, is “reform.” As in change. As in the future.

They don’t worry about Washington-manufactured crises— such as counting how many times Hillary Clinton has answered questions from the press. (The latest pseudo-Clinton scandal.) They only care about that if it has an impact on people outside the Beltway. And then they adjust and adapt.

Bill and Hillary Clinton learned long ago what should be obvious to anyone spending a day in politics: Voters care about their own lives, their own futures, far more than they do about the latest Washington feeding frenzy. Ideas trump innuendo. This is why the Clintons keep winning.

Until the GOP gives us its obsession with the former First Family. Until it positions itself as the party of the future and the Clintons, implicitly, as relics of the past, then the party is going to be in for another shock next year—this one even bigger than 1992.

Politico   6/5/15   By Annie Karni

One of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s most loyal and fiercest supporters is throwing a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton will attend a fundraiser on June 29 in Manhattan hosted by public relations executive Ken Sunshine and his wife, Nancy Hollander. The couple is co-hosting the event with Janet and Marvin Rosen, the former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who in 1996 was at the center of a fundraising controversy for helping to arrange sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom for wealthy Bill Clinton donors.

Sunshine has also been a longtime friend of the Clintons, but his strongest political tie is to de Blasio, who worked under him when he served as chief of staff to former Mayor David Dinkins. The two have remained close ever since.

De Blasio served as Clinton’s campaign manager when she ran for Senate, but so far has publicly refused to endorse her, instead using the 2016 election to position himself as a national leader on progressive issues. That has made some longtime supporters of both politicians, like Sunshine, feel awkwardly caught in the middle.

Sunshine, whose firm is Sunshine Sachs, hosted the first fundraiser de Blasio ever held, when he was running for a seat on the New York City Council after managing Clinton’s Senate campaign. During the 2013 mayoral race, many of de Blasio’s fundraising committee meetings were held in Sunshine’s conference room, and as Mayor, de Blasio has on occasion continued to use Sunshine’s office when he needs meeting space away from City Hall.

“I love Bill, and if I’m not the first, I’ll be among the first to contribute to his reelection campaign,” Sunshine said. “That doesn’t meant I’m not going to be an early supporter and fundraiser for another friend, whose name happens to be Hillary Clinton. I assume Bill will eventually endorse her, but a lot of his friends like me are going to do it before him.”

The Sunshine and Rosen fundraiser could end up being a star-studded affair. Some of Sunshine’s longtime clients include Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Jon Bon Jovi and Leonardo DiCaprio.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/de-blasio-ally-to-hold-clinton-fundraiser-118694.html

Media Matters   6/2/2015   by ERIC BOEHLERT

The raucous political warfare of the 1990s returned into view late last week with the stunning news that former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is under indictment for allegedly agreeing to pay more than $3 million in hush money to cover up sexual abuse involving a male student at a high school where Hastert taught decades ago.

Hastert’s unsettling case doesn’t have anything to do with partisan politics, per se. But his rise to the speakership back in 1998 sure did. Like virtually everything else inside the Beltway at the time, Hastert’s promotion revolved around the Republicans’ relentless impeachment pursuit against President Bill Clinton. And today, Hastert’s alleged crime once again throws into focus what a strange and hypocritical spectacle it was for GOP men to play sex cop and crusade for impeachment.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton defined American politics in the 1990s. It also defined the Beltway press, which still clings to many of the bad Clinton-related habits it formed that decade. The impeachment farce, where the press teamed up with Republicans to wage war on a Democrat, could also explain why the Clintons today might not fully trust the media as Hillary Clinton expands her presidential run and the press stands “primed” to take her down.

Why won’t Hillary Clinton open up to the press? Why can’t Bill and Hillary handle the media? Why has she “withdrawn into a gilded shell“? Why does she wear media “armor“? Those questions have been rehashed in recent months as journalists focus on themselves and what role they’ll play in the unfolding nomination contest.

A suggestion: Follow the path back to Dennis Hastert’s impeachment era for clues to those Clinton press questions.

During the 1990s, Hastert remained a firm advocate of impeachment, at one point condemning the president for his “inability to abide by the law.” Hastert stressed, “The evidence in President Clinton’s case is overwhelming that he has abused and violated the public trust.”

Of course it was the impeachment imbroglio that elevated Hastert, indirectly, to his lofty position of speaker of the House; a position he later leveraged into millions by becoming a very wealthy lobbyist.

The background: Former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign in 1998 after the impeachment-obsessed GOP faced disastrous midterm losses. (Gingrich later admitted he was engaged in an affair with a Congressional aide at the time.) Up next was Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA), chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee. “One of the loudest of those calling for the House to impeach Clinton over an extra-marital affair,” noted the National Journal, Livingston was soon ousted after he was forced to publicly confess to committing adultery “on occasion.”

Into that void stepped Hastert.

That means all three Republican House leaders who pursued Clinton’s impeachment have now confessed or been accused of sexual and moral transgressions themselves. Those were the people the D.C press took its cues from during the impeachment charade?

As Orin Kerr noted in the Washington Post following the Hastert indictment:

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

While some in the press have conceded that the ’90s impeachment was a strange circus, the truth is the Beltway press basically served as executive producers for the GOP’s doomed theatrical run. It was the media elite who legitimized for years the right-wing’s Javert-like pursuit of all things Clinton. “So much of the media was invested in breathless, often uncritical coverage of Clinton’s impeachment,” wrote Josh Marshall at Salon in 2002, while detailing the final release of the independent prosecutor’s $70 million Clinton investigation.

Put another way, the same D.C. press corps that openly taunted the Clintons for years in the ’90s, culminating with impeachment, is the same D.C. press corps that’s now openly taunting them, for instance, regarding the Clinton Foundation,  Hillary Clinton’s emails, and anything/everything else that can be presented as a Clinton “scandal” story.

That’s why when the New York Times story about Hillary Clinton’s email account first broke in March, “The media and politicos and Twitterati immediately responded with all the measured cautious skepticism we’ve come to expect in response to any implication of a Clinton Scandal,” noted Wonkette. “That is to say, none.” And that’s why Times columnist and chief Clinton sex chronicler Maureen Dowd has, to date, published 100 columns mentioning “Lewinsky.”

More than twenty years ago, the Clintons understood that the so-called liberal media was working with conservative activists and Republican prosecutors to try to destroy Bill’s presidency. For the GOP, the motivation was purely partisan. For the press, it seemed to be a mix of careerism (Clinton bashing proved to be good for business), combined with a genuine dislike of the Clintons.

Today, it’s often difficult to recapture just how completely bonkers the D.C. media establishment went during the impeachment saga, and how on some days it seemed journalists were more pruriently obsessed with the Clintons than their tireless Republican tormentors. The recent Hastert sexual abuse allegation helps bring into focus the absurdity of the era, and reminds us why, as a new campaign season unfolds, the Clintons might not fully trust the Beltway media.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/06/02/dennis-hastert-impeachment-and-why-the-clintons/203845

The New York Times   5/30/2015   by Maureen Dowd

IS Hollywood really ready to give a 67-year-old woman a leading role in a big-budget production?

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has echoes of various classic movies: “Single White Female,” with Hillary creepily co-opting the identity of the more trendy Elizabeth Warren; “My Fair Lady,” with Hillary sitting meekly and being schooled on how to behave by tyrannical Pygmalions (Iowa voters); “The Usual Suspects,” with Hillary’s hoodlums, Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, vying to be Keyser Söze; and, of course, “How to Steal a Million,” a caper about a heist plotted by a couple that doesn’t need the money.

From a narrative point of view, Hollywood is more intrigued with the scenario of their old raffish Southern favorite, Bill Clinton, as the first First Lad than the earnest Midwestern Hillary as the first female POTUS.

On TV, after all, women presidents are old hat.

I recently interviewed several dozen Hollywood players, mostly on background because of fears about the famed Clinton vindictive streak.

They aren’t over the moon about Barack Obama anymore, and even feel burned. He was like a razzle-dazzle trailer that turned out to be a disappointing movie with mediocre box office.

You hear plenty of complaints about the president’s mingy care and feeding of donors.

“It’s not unheard-of to think that liking people is part of the job,” one political consultant to the stars said tartly.

Hollywood is mostly united behind Hillary, with a few Bernie outliers and Elizabeth dreamers. But it’s a forced march.

“There’s this feeling like, ‘Oh, damn! Now we’re all going to have to show up to Jeffrey’s event,’ ” said one studio big shot.

Drinking wine at his glamorous house, an Obama bundler who is trying to work up some Hillary enthusiasm, agreed: “‘Jeffrey Katzenberg is calling’ is a call that you avoid in a way that you couldn’t before.”

Because the Clintons have been in politics for decades, there is a throng at the teat, making donors, bundlers and retainers fret that the rewards and appointments will be spread thin.

“Hollywood needs perpetual attention from its presidents, from filming bar mitzvah congratulations to stays in the Lincoln Bedroom,” said one Obama associate in Hollywood.

The sheer size of the Clinton universe has caused, as a political consultant to bold-faced names says, “a palpable lack of energy amongst the people who have been insiders for years.” Not to mention a huge management challenge.

“Money in this town is value driven, ego driven,” one major fund-raiser said. “It’s not about tracking legislation as it affects our own interests.”

Hollywood helped create Clinton Inc., finding an early pop-culture affinity with the young governor of Arkansas and jumping in to be his A.T.M.

The symbiotic attraction between the two capitals of illusion peaked — and even got a little overripe — during Bill’s reign, when he acted like a Hollywood groupie, hanging with the moguls and stars under the palms into the wee hours. Even some in Hollywood thought it unseemly when he began flying around with high-fliers Ron Burkle and Steve Bing.

Bill and Hillary were stunned and furious when David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Katzenberg held a fund-raising reception at the Beverly Hilton and a dinner at Geffen’s home for Obama — a knife in the heart of Clinton Inc. Now Hollywood must kiss the ring to fund the restoration and counteract conservative dark money, ponying up a chunk of the billion-plus Hillary plans to spend on her campaign.

Katzenberg made his peace with Hillary and is helping spearhead her “super PAC.” Geffen, who has not talked to the Clintons, gave her primary campaign the maximum of $2,700. Bill Maher, who sent Obama’s super PAC a check for a million (and never got a thank-you note) says he will vote for her but won’t fork over another mill.

Haim Saban, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers billionaire who describes himself as “a former cartoon schlepper,” never deserted Hillary and this month hosted a $1.9 million fund-raiser for her at his Beverly Hills mansion.

Recalling the bitter 2008 civil war as we nibbled biscotti in his L.A. office, he waved off those who yearn for fresh and new.

“When I go to buy potatoes and tomatoes, I look for fresh and new,” he said. “We’re talking about electing the leader of the free world.”

But his childlike excitement is less common than the jaded attitude of a Hillary supporter who sighed: “Nobody wants to go to a fund-raiser and get another picture with her. But we have to figure out how to get her there,” for the sake of their issues.

The joke circulates in Hollywood that Hillary is like Coca-Cola’s Dasani water: She’s got a great distribution system, but nobody likes the taste.

Fortunately for her, there’s no difference between an enthusiastic check for $250,000 and an unenthusiastic check.

The prevailing mood in this faltering Dream Factory is cynical. Some worry about the drip-drip of revelations about the Clintons. “It’s like that Dorothy Parker line, ‘What fresh hell is this?’ ” said one top Hollywood Democrat.

Said another: “It sits badly when something drops and it’s, here they go again, thinking they can write their own rules, be cute by half.”

Some still worry, as Geffen did in 2008, that Bill shenanigans will get Hillary into trouble.

Sipping vodka at the Chateau Marmont, Bill Maher said he was not concerned, noting: “Who could have less to do with Bill Clinton’s sex life than Hillary?”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-hooray-for-hillarywood-hillary-clinton.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=1&referrer=

The right’s newest crusade has an old fake villain.

Politico   5/28/2015   By JOE CONASON

Has Washington learned nothing from Whitewater? The Clintons have spent their entire political lives in the capital dogged by one fake scandal after another. And, as we’ve been reminded this week, the fake villain in many of their fake scandals always seems to be the same: Sidney Blumenthal.

By leaking emails between Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton to the New York Times, the House Select Committee on Benghazi majority staff evidently aimed to frame Blumenthal into a sinister narrative of Libyan intrigue, encouraging dark suspicions about his work for the Clinton Foundation and his relationship with the former Secretary of State. The fact that Blumenthal was paid some $10,000 a month for working at the Clinton Foundation doesn’t change anything: This remains a fake scandal that will fail to turn up any real wrongdoing.

Having known Sid for nearly 40 years, I feel confident predicting that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the committee chair, will find nothing to substantiate the fantasies marketed by his staff to the Times, which set the stage for Blumenthal’s subpoena and deposition in a political show trial that will unfold sometime in the coming weeks. Sid passed along information that he thought might be useful to his friend, the secretary of state—someone he has known for nearly 30 years and with whom he worked closely in the Clinton administration.

As the emails illegally purloined from his computer by the Romanian hacker called “Guccifer” indicate, he kept that role separate from discussions about a Libyan relief project, which was intended to provide hospital beds and medicine. That project never got beyond the concept phase and remained entirely distinct from Blumenthal’s job at the foundation, which involved several projects—mostly concerned with President Clinton’s legacy. Certainly it was no crime for the foundation to pay him for that work.

Unfortunately, the Washington press corps tends toward exaggeration and worse when the subject is Sid—and, come to think of it, often when the subject is the Clintons, too. It was no surprise to see Karen Tumulty declare in The Washington Post that “Blumenthal had business interests in Libya,” as if he was making money there—when the reality is that he was never paid a penny and never asked the secretary for anything.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page went even further, demanding a Justice Department investigation of those alleged “business interests,” complete with a far-fetched theory that his emails to her were somehow “in violation of State rules,” while noting darkly that both “used private email addresses.”

The Journal editorialists, whose style harks back to their page’s decade-long Whitewater obsession, don’t specify what kind of email address Blumenthal, who is after all a private citizen, should have used. (Whether Hillary Clinton should have imitated her predecessors in using private email is a separate question that she has already addressed—and again, Blumenthal can’t be blamed for that.) But the Journal’s sinister, heavy-breathing tone, like so much coverage and commentary, remains unsupported by anything but speculation.

Meanwhile, nobody asks why the Republican Congressional leadership should feel entitled to squander millions of tax dollars on yet another Benghazi inquisition—despite last year’s exhaustive 2014 report by the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, which effectively dismissed all the crackpot conjecture about cover-ups and conspiracies, following several other lengthy official investigations. Rather than any perfidy on the part of Blumenthal or Clinton, this episode demonstrates how little the Washington press corps has learned over the past two decades from pursuing bogus scandals like Whitewater.

It is telling when reporters suggest, for instance, that Blumenthal represents a “paranoid” streak in Hillary Clinton’s thinking—as if the years of conniving against her and her husband by a network of right-wing adversaries never occurred.

The media appears to have forgotten how, during Blumenthal’s first summer working in the White House, ideological refugee David Brock told him about wealthy conservatives, notably Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who were spending millions of dollars on a secretive scheme known as the “Arkansas Project” to destroy Clinton’s presidency—and how those same figures lurked behind the Whitewater investigation, Kenneth Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel and the media campaign to smear the Clintons as somehow culpable in the 1993 suicide of White House lawyer Vince Foster.

Sid recounted this partisan offensive in The Clinton Wars, his account of the Clinton administration’s struggle against Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the entire constellation of forces determined to bring down a Democratic president they considered illegitimate. In that struggle, he served as a loyal partisan, defending Bill and Hillary Clinton and, as he and others in the White House believed, the Constitution of the United States.

When Bill Clinton first invited Blumenthal to join the White House staff, the newly re-elected president wasn’t hiring a hatchet man. Over the preceding decade, they had established a friendship based not on common animosities, but a shared interest in how to renew the Democratic Party and progressive politics. Blumenthal had introduced Clinton to Tony Blair, then the new leader of Britain’s Labor Party and future Prime Minister, whose outlook was strikingly similar. Bringing together social democratic leaders across Europe with the U.S. president in what became known as “the Third Way” movement was a substantial part of Sid’s portfolio as a special assistant to Clinton.

But Blumenthal’s years of reporting on the American right had prepared him for a less uplifting mission—to confront the ongoing plot against Clinton by right-wing lawyers, operatives, and financiers, which already was building toward a climax by then. When the unfolding crisis finally concluded in Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, Sid became the target of House and Senate Republicans (and his old friend Christopher Hitchens), who tried to set him up for a perjury trap.

In the process he was “demonized” in the Washington media, later writing: “To the right wing, I was the focus of evil in the White House. To the scandal-beat press, as a former journalist, I was a traitor, a Lucifer-like figure who had leaped from grace to serve the devil.” He had committed no offense, but left public service with over $300,000 in legal bills.

Not everyone was pleased by impeachment’s denouement—and many still suffer from Clinton Derangement Syndrome. So Sid has emerged again as an almost fetishistic object of spite (and a convenient surrogate for attacks on Hillary Clinton). He evokes turbulent emotion on the editorial pages of the Journal, the New York Post, and kindred outlets, which depict him as a ruthless, manipulative schemer, constantly immersed in skullduggery on behalf of his powerful patrons.

Rather than a perpetrator of dirty tricks, however, Sid has been a victim—and not just of Guccifer. On the first day that he went to work in the White House in the summer of 1997, the Drudge Report gleefully published a false, defamatory, anonymously sourced post that accused him of abusing his wife Jackie, to whom he remains happily married after 39 years. (The main suspect in that ugly episode was, not incidentally, a political columnist for the Journal.)

While his critics and enemies never succeeded in bringing Blumenthal down, they have concocted an image of him that is strangely flat and clichéd. Blinded by animus, they have no realistic sense of who he is, what he has done, or why the Clintons might continue to value his friendship. He’s a bit more interesting and complicated than their imaginary hobgoblin.

A talented and industrious writer, Sid has authored several significant books on American politics and co-produced two movies, including Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary on the Bush administration’s torture policies, Taxi to the Dark Side. (Currently he is working on a four-volume series for Simon & Schuster about the political life of Abraham Lincoln.) Unafraid to dissent from the Clinton-bashing consensus among Washington elites, he indeed became a dedicated ally to Hillary and Bill, but not only to them—he has developed a substantial network of friends and contacts around the world. Familiar as he is with practical politics, what drives him is a commitment to liberal values and ideas.

“Sidney Blumenthal was not as billed,” acknowledged the late Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in his 2000 memoir, recalling the day he deposed the presidential aide and longtime journalist in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. Specter, then a Republican, evidently intended a gruff compliment. Expecting a tense and combative witness—the “Sid Vicious” of tabloid headlines—he was surprised instead to find the White House aide and longtime journalist to be cooperative and even cordial.

Today it still seems rather simple-minded to define Sid, in the words of that Journal editorial, as an “opposition hit man.” And it is absurd to suggest, absent any evidence, that he committed some legal or ethical offense.

With another Clinton seeking the White House, an epidemic of derangement was sadly inevitable. Before November 2016, there will surely be more to come. But if there is indeed any scandal in this affair, it lies in the partisan abuse of power by Congressional Republicans, trying desperately to sustain a Benghazi investigation that should have ended many months ago.

Like the effort to frame Blumenthal during the impeachment trial, this too shall pass—and then fizzle away.