According to Carl Bernstein, in his recent book, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the answer to the title question is, as former CIA Director George Tenet might say, a slam dunk, and it is negative.
Throughout her years as a public person there has been sexual innuendo about Hillary implying that somewhere along her way--in the rumor it is usually at Wellesley--she experimented with lesbianism. (One wonders if a malleable male politician, say Bill Clinton, a former overweight band boy, would be accused of having "experimented" with being gay at Georgetown University, in the same manner as "tough, inflexible" Hillary at Wellesley.) When not whispered sotto voce, such innuendo about her reached its most incendiary and unsupportable in 2005 with Edward Klein's supposed biography, The Truth about Hillary, an ideological screed, which contains barely smidgens--with no context--about what its title promises. Little could be more contradictory to what is known about Hillary's actual character and history--and her manner, with, respectively, men and women who are her friends--than the notion of her as a lesbian. p. 47
However, DC Dave followers familiar with the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression will notice that Bernstein, in this short passage, has managed to work in numbers 3, 4, and 6. He has characterized what are really quite serious specific allegations as "rumors;" he has set up a straw man in the form of someone who would jump to the conclusion that a "tough, inflexible" female must have lesbian inclinations, and he has zeroed in on the charges of the created straw man, Edward Klein; and he has impugned Klein's motives as ideological.In a previous article I have called Klein a "crude propagandist," not just for his Hillary biography, which is subtitled, "What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President," but especially for his work as the ghost writer of the Parade Magazine Walter Scott column. If one does an Internet search, using any search engine, for the terms "Hillary lesbian," what one finds right away is that Klein's extremely weak case for Hillary's possible lesbianism currently dominates the Worldwide Web. Finding the Outside magazine article that leads with Jack Wheeler's charges emanating from White House Secret Service contacts or Gennifer Flowers's quote from Bill about Hillary's Sapphic practices is next to impossible.
Edward Klein has become virtually everyone's straw man of choice when it comes to Hillary and lesbianism, and it should be abundantly clear to anyone not blinded by his own political partisanship that that is what was intended. And the attacks on Klein are not confined to the usual mainstream "liberal" venues. This is how Bill Press leads off his article in Joseph Farah's generally conservative World Net Daily:
Just when you think the right-wing hate machine could sink no lower, along comes the pack of lies just packaged by Penguin Books under the title "The Truth About Hillary," by Edward Klein. The truth about Hillary? No way. It's nothing but a hatchet job, aimed at destroying Sen. Clinton's reputation and political future. The jacket flap alone exposes Klein as nothing but a right-wing political assassin.
Press goes on to inform us that, "In his personal attacks against Hillary Clinton, Klein stoops so low that he's been abandoned by some of his fellow conservatives. Bill O'Reilly won't book him on his Fox News show. Chief Clinton hater Dick Morris condemned the book. And New York Post columnist John Podhoretz called it a 'smear for profit.'"
One search engine hit looks a bit more promising. A posting on the conservative, Clinton-hating, Free Republic forum is entitled Exposed! Hillary Lived with Lesbian - The Truth about Their 4-YEAR Relationship (with pics), Globe Magazine, May 4, 2004 weekly issue, Bob Altman.
What follows is a lot of the usual anti-Clinton banter in posting after posting in the thread, until someone pleads, "Can anyone post the article itself or summarize the information in it?" Unfortunately, no one does, or if they tried to it didn't make it up on the forum. That someone might have tried and failed looks like a real possibility when one considers what happened to the original poster, whose screen name is "threat matrix." When one clicks on his name, what comes up is, "This account has been banned or suspended." That is precisely what happened to me on Free Republic when I persisted in exposing the work of false critics of the Clintons some years ago.
Perhaps the Globe article had no substance to it. After all, it is a supermarket tabloid of the sort that specializes in celebrity gossip, but, at times, such rags can be more reliable, and certainly more hard-hitting, than the mainstream press. A couple of examples that I ran across were the July 27, 1999, Star article about the branding of pledges by the Yale fraternity of which young George Bush was president and the February 19, 2002, article in the National Enquirer about the questionable "suicide" of Enron executive Cliff Baxter. If anyone might have saved a copy of that Globe article, I would appreciate it if they would copy it and send it to me.
The Evidence
With so much sand being thrown into our eyes by the likes of Carl Bernstein and Bill Press, readers need to be reminded that there is a rather large body of evidence that Hillary Clinton is, indeed, a lesbian, and not just someone who might have merely dabbled in the practice at one time or another. It goes beyond her hard manner and her most un-wife-like indifference to her husband's carousing. Here is a review of what was first presented in "Hillary Biographer Crude Propagandist":
- Gennifer Flowers quoted her lover, Bill Clinton, colorfully, and to this writer's Southern ears, quite authentically, with respect to Hillary's experience in performing oral sex on women on page 42 of her book, Passion and Betrayal.
- Dr. Jack Wheeler, citing unnamed Secret Service agents, reported in a published interview that the agents had caught Hillary in the sex act with another woman in the White House and named a prominent Hollywood actress who hails from Arkansas as one of her preferred partners. Secret Service agents were also the source of the story told to the policeman son-in-law of a colleague of this writer that Hillary had a regular woman whom she brought into the White House for sexual purposes.
- Jerry Oppenheimer repeated and dismissed the Washington "rumor" in his book, State of the Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, that a Washington veterinarian, on house call to the White House to treat a sick Socks, the Clinton cat, had "opened the wrong door" and caught Hillary in bed with another woman. This is virtually the same story that was told to me in early 1993, the first I had heard that Hillary might be a lesbian. In the previous article I characterized the account as fourth-hand to me, which might have left readers with the impression that, as evidence, it was less solid than it actually is. Any weakness in the chain of communication of the story could easily bring it down. One of the people might have been simply repeating a rumor or a pure fabrication, one might suspect. So let's have a closer look at that chain: The person who told me was a business contact of some years' standing. I don't know anything about his political leanings; we never discussed politics. His overall credibility was important, because he was engaged in selling my organization on a product that his organization has developed, with millions of dollars in the balance. He was leaving my office at the end of the day and introduced the subject in an offhand sort of way. His sister, he said, was a Washington-area veterinarian who has a friend who is another Washington-area veterinarian. That friend had told her that she had received a call from the White House requesting someone to come treat the Clinton's sick cat. She sent a female assistant, who had difficulty locating the cat. In her search, she happened to open what must have been Hillary's bedroom door, and there in the bed were two women, one of whom she took to be Hillary. She told her boss about the incident, the boss told her friend, the friend told her brother, and the brother told me.
There it is in one place, the best evidence of the alleged lesbianism, as it is known to this writer, of the person who, we are told by the national media, is currently the nationally-preferred candidate for president of the United States. One may contrast it with the various red herrings that can be found in the various books and articles about Hillary that deign to broach the subject. I would urge everyone with an interest in who might be the next occupant of the position of leader of the world's most powerful country to have a look at the evidence and make up his or her own mind about it.
One could hardly fail to see that I would answer the title question in the affirmative. That conclusion is heavily influenced by my belief in the credibility of two acquaintances. The reader's conclusion, in turn, would depend to a degree on how reliable I am perceived to be. On that point, one might notice that I am in a very similar position to the man who told me the veterinarian story. A visit to my home page will show you that I am also trying to sell my audience on some other very important things--although in this case there is no personal financial gain hanging in the balance. I would not want to do anything to damage my credibility with respect to those other matters. At the same time, one may read what I have written about those other important things as a means of assessing my general credibility, and, therefore, my credibility with respect to the question at issue.
Why It Matters
In the previous article, I argued that Hillary's presumed lesbianism is important primarily because it is a secret and that, along with far more important things that have also been covered up about her, would make her subject to blackmail. If she were an open lesbian, it may or may not be worth talking about, depending upon one's ideological orientation, but I don't believe that it would be as dangerous for the country's future. The same could be said if she were simply running again to be one of one hundred U.S. senators.
If you are a partisan Democrat (for those few who might have read this far), it ought to matter to you as well. If you are like most of the ones I know, you have already told anyone who will listen that you don't care about anyone's sexual orientation and that anyone who would even bring up such things is nothing but a low-life and a bigot, and probably a hypocrite, to boot. But doesn't it bother you that people who surely don't wish the Democrats well, and who seem to hate Hillary Clinton with a passion, have been holding their fire with respect to the published evidence of Hillary's lesbianism? Isn't it far better to get this matter before the public before she is the only choice that Americans have for president except a Republican who would be likely to pursue some version of the current despised policies? You may not care whether or not Hillary is a lesbian, but you can't be sure about the views of the general voting public.
Concerning the despised policies, I believe that the evidence is strong that she is the most likely of the Democratic candidates to continue to pursue the worst one of all, which is the war in Iraq (as well as the war in Afghanistan). Increasingly, the war's supporters seem to think so as well. She was all for Bill's foreign interventions when he was president, she voted to support the attack upon Iraq, and she refuses to apologize for it. Whatever she might say now, I believe that what she has said and done in the past indicates that she is the most likely candidate--maybe in either party--to continue the policies of the Bush-Clinton era. So it is more important that it is Hillary Clinton who is probably being duplicitous about her likely lesbianism than it would be if it were someone else, almost anyone else.
It's not just the policies that she would pursue, but the fact that the Clinton administration from beginning to end, from the Vincent Foster murder to the Marc Rich pardon, was a veritable sinkhole of corruption. The Clinton corruption, like the Clinton policies, also shows a great deal of overlap with that of the Bushes, going back to the days when Bill was governor of Arkansas and the first George Bush was the president, and illegal drugs were being smuggled into the country through an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas. Richard Ben-Veniste was a lawyer for the later murdered drug pilot, Barry Seal, in the Mena operation. As lead Democratic counsel on the Senate committee looking into the death of Hillary's friend and long-time colleague, Foster, Ben-Veniste did yeoman work on the cover-up. George W. Bush rewarded him by making him a member of the 9-11 Commission. Ben-Veniste's Republican counterpart in the Senate Foster cover-up was Michael Chertoff. Chertoff now occupies one of the most powerful positions in the country as head of Homeland Security. Playing even more important roles in the Foster death cover-up were the lawyers John Bates and Brett Kavanaugh, who were key "investigators" in the Kenneth Starr sham inquiry into Foster's death. George Bush has made them both federal judges. Bates recently threw out the lawsuit of the outed CIA operative, Valerie Plame, against Vice President Richard Cheney. Bringing things full circle, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, whose prison sentence for perjury in the Plame case was recently voided by Bush, was the lawyer for Marc Rich.
Perhaps the strongest argument for a full airing of the question of Hillary's lesbianism is that the American mainstream press is working so hard to keep the lid on the question and is protecting and promoting Hillary for president in many of the same ways that they have protected and promoted Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They clearly want her to be president, and that can't be good, considering who they have clearly wanted to be president in recent history and what the results have been. An example of their devious Hillary promotion was on display in the coverage of the recent Democratic candidates' debate from South Carolina. At its conclusion, CNN turned to its expert commentator, Jeffrey Toobin, for an assessment. Toobin, with a bon mot that he had doubtless prepared before the debate ever took place, because no fair-minded observer could have perceived her as so dominant, opined that the group came across as "Gladys Knight and the Pips," with Hillary in the starring role and the others as mere anonymous backups. Hillary stood out, he said, as the one who seemed most "presidential." No mention was made when Toobin was introduced that he is a longtime apologist for the Clintons who has even written a book belittling the charges of wrongdoing against them.
Whether it has to do with her sexual preferences or her other actions as a public figure, you can be sure that these opinion molders, Toobin, Press, Klein, Bernstein, and the rest of the mainstream media are engaging in the first of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression, they are dummying up. They are not telling us everything that we need to know about Hillary Clinton. Sunlight is still the best political disinfectant, and we can hardly get too much of it. In the case of Bernstein, we don't have to guess that he knows more than he's telling us. It's a virtual certainty that he has read the most revealing book about the corruption of the Clintons that has been published. That is The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by the British reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. We know that because we know that the book is in Bernstein's personal library. You can see the dust jacket with the picture of Hillary whispering into Bill's ear in this photograph of Bernstein in his study. The book is directly above the cuff of his right shirt sleeve.
Since we began this essay with a quote from Carl Bernstein, a thoroughly dishonest quote, as the evidence we have presented shows, we shall leave the reader with a quote about the young Bernstein from his high school years when he was just beginning to show his talent:
It was Carl's best American history paper, Alma Davidson, his teacher, thought. The essay, a total of fourteen pages, complete with footnotes, was neatly typed and well written. The subject was the famous South American political hero Salvador Lopez. That puzzled her. She had never heard of Salvador Lopez.
A few days later Carl got the paper back. He received an F. Everything in the paper had been made up. Indeed, there was no Salvador Lopez. -- Adrian Havill, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, p. 22.
Thus did Bernstein reveal, well before he began to get paid for it, that he had just the right stuff to be one of our leading Hillary Clinton-promoting journalists.
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