Peggy Noonan reviews Ed Klein's Hillary book

And basically, she pans it.

Rush Limbaugh said yesterday that conservatives everywhere will rush to pan Ed Klein's new book, The Truth about Hillary, because "we don't do things that way." Peggy Noonan doesn't seem to want to fall into that trap. Indeed she praises Klein for taking on Hillary with the gloves off. Politics, she rightly observes, is a bare-knuckle fight, and Klein dishes out his jabs and crosses and haymakers with the best of them.

The trouble, she says, is that Klein fails to hit the right target--which apparently is her senior thesis from Wellesley College on how to change American political culture and tilt it permanently to the left. Instead he hits other targets that she finds less worthy--specifically the description of a "culture of Lesbianism" at Wellesley College to which Hillary enthusiastically belonged. But her biggest gripe is that Hillary's story is so "over-the-top" that no one will believe it, and so if you're going to write her story, you need to get your facts straight and your sources lined up and willing to stand up and let the public count them--out loud, too, and not anonymously.

In this, Noonan might possibly be paraphrasing Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Information, who brazenly taught his Leader how to lie. But what, I ask, is so hard to believe about a woman who makes a plan for power and sticks to it for forty years, or however long it takes? Haven't her very actions left no doubt in the mind of any sane observer?

I agree that Klein would have served his readers better to pry loose that senior thesis, which Wellesley College is apparently keeping under wraps. I further agree that allegations of homosexual orientation on Hillary's part are direct-mail fund-raising fodder for the base and are not nearly as necessary or to-the-point as her sympathies for a changing of the law to make homosexuality a protected, or even a legally preferred, lifestyle. You don't have to be homosexual yourself to support such wrongheaded policies--and furthermore, not all homosexuals support such policies anyway.

Actually--and I glean this from Klein's interview with Sean Hannity--the evidence points to Hillary being not a dedicated homosexual at all, but a switch-hitter. Witness her having an affair with Vince Foster--an affair that, Klein says, was also a matter of convenience. Switch-hitting is definitely more of a piece with her being willing to cooperate with anyone and everyone to advance herself. And she might indeed be a political switch-hitter--in which case everyone, conservative and liberal, ought to ask himself whether he can trust her any further than he could throw her.

That said, I have to wonder, as does Rush Limbaugh, whether we now are witnessing a pointless dissociative reaction on the part of conservative editorialists and other commentators. As I said above, politics is bare-knuckle fighting. The only real issue is whether the blows you land will be telling.