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The roots of a hostage crisis
The angry Cuban detainees in Louisiana are just some of the illegal immigrants trapped in the INS's permanent limbo.
By Robert Bryce and Lisa Tozzi
[12/20/99]

To the moon, Al
Al Gore and Bill Bradley square off in New Hampshire, with Ted Koppel cast in the role of marriage counselor.
By Jake Tapper
[12/18/99]

Arianna Huffington is dead wrong
In her unbelievable defense of the Serbs, the syndicated columnist condones the massacre of innocent civilians by the Serbs.
By Ian Williams
[12/17/99]

Adios to all that
Old passions run high over the fate of a little boy, but both Cubans and the exile community are ready to embrace a new future -- together.
By Joe Conason
[12/17/99]

A GOP rebel in Dixie
If passionate presidential candidate John McCain hopes to topple George W. Bush, he may have to dare to be boring.
By Jake Tapper
[12/17/99]

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She makes much of her access to Dorothy Rodham, Hillary's mother (whose revelations are only revealing in their emptiness), but doesn't even question the now-dead Hugh, who sat forbiddingly in another room while Sheehy interviewed his wife in 1992. Did she ever try to talk to the man she accuses, with no evidence, of "sexually undermining" his daughter? It appears not, and the one intriguing fact that she "uncovered" -- that he skipped Hillary's shining moment, her Wellesley graduation -- turns out not to be true.

So if we can't blame Hillary's dad for her choice to subsume her career under her husband's, what was the cause? Barbara Olson, predictably, sees it as typical left-wing stealth and dishonesty, sly ol' Hillary trying to hide her dreary Marxist politics behind her husband's good-old-boy persona. Ironically, the right-wing Olson gives Hillary more political respect than the supposedly sympathetic Sheehy, who sacrifices political analysis for pop-psych platitudes and a disproportionate focus on Hillary's hairstyles, clothing choices and, yes, the first bosom. (Acccording to Sheehy, Hillary has been showing a lot more of it as she comes into her own.)

Olson makes much of the short-lived Alinsky connection, opening every chapter with a quote from "Rules for Radicals," most of which display the ruthless, opportunistic left-wing politics she thinks the Clintons personify. She reads her 1970s articles on children's rights and takes them deadly seriously. But Olson gives Hillary too much credit for left-wing constancy. In reality, she's stood for very little besides political survival, embracing with gusto the "triangulation" advised by Dick Morris, even as she personally disdained him.

Now on her own, running for Senate, Hillary is just another New York Democrat. Earlier this year she tried to soften her historic support for a Palestinian state by endorsing Israel's claim to a unified Jerusalem as its capital, which even her weak-kneed husband won't back. And where she once stood up to teachers' unions in Arkansas, her New York coming-out party last month was at the United Federation of Teachers office in Manhattan. Those who've been clamoring to let Hillary be Hillary, as though she'd run as a true-blue liberal or have more integrity than her husband, will be disappointed. Like her husband, she will try to do whatever it takes to get elected; but unlike him, she lacks the instincts to know exactly what that is, and the needy drive to get it done.

Reading the two latest Clinton books, it's impossible to miss the fact that her fingerprints are all over the biggest disasters of her husband's presidency: Filegate, Travelgate, the health-care mess, Whitewater and maybe most important, the attempt to stonewall first the New York Times and later Kenneth Starr when the Clintons' ties to all those shady Arkansas land deals were first being probed. Yes, the scandalousness of Whitewater was exaggerated, and yes, as Clinton supporters Gene Lyons and Salon's Joe Conason have noted, Sheehy gets many details about the scandal wrong.

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