Fred's Book Club: The End, 2001 Edition.

Happy Wednesday, a.k.a. Hump Day, the day we run our Humpback Writers feature, in which writers with no known back issues have written books that have the singular advantage of me owning a copy of them. The books, that is, not the writers. I don't have a big photocopy of P.G. Wodehouse hanging on my office wall. Although that might improve the décor.

Today, January 20, for no particular reason, I am profiling a book from 2001 -- Barbara Olson's The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House. 

Okay, I should clarify that I'm not using this book to take shots at our departing president -- I mainly chose today to run this book because it's another day for the transference of presidential power, as when the Clintons left the White House twenty years ago. 

So what, according to author Olson, did the Clintons do that rates the "Last, Desperate Abuses of Power" subtitle? Well, to cite one abuse, the second chapter is called "Clemency for Cop Killers." For example, she writes, "Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most violent of the left-wing militias that disrupted the nation from the 1960s through the 1980s.... In October of 1981, Rosenberg's gang held up a Brink's truck in Nanuet, New York, killing guard Peter Paige and two police officers, Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, the first black officer on the local force. Rosenberg drove the getaway car and managed to escape." Rosenberg and her little friends also bombed the U.S. Capitol on November 7, 1983, causing no loss of life but a hell of a lot more damage than the "sedition" of two weeks ago did. Naturally Bill Clinton granted her clemency on his last day in office, and she now works for Black Lives Matter, along with other expressly Communist outfits. 

Anyone who still harbors some weird ideas that Bill and Hillary Clinton are good and decent people ought to read this book, although in the wake of #MeToo I wonder if anyone does, at least in Bill's case. But here's a description of the Clintons that could fit any well-known Washington lizard people with whom you may be familiar: 

The Clintons are members of the mandarin class -- public officials, accustomed to influence, respect, and privilege. People listen to them. People flatter them. And people do things for them, like feeding them, paying their bills, and giving them gifts. The Clintons may not even realize how much they have come to regard as an entitlement public financing and ubiquitous sycophancy. They can thus disparage the wealthy and rail against the "decade of greed" without any sense of shame at never, really having had to pay bills, meet a mortgage, or fix a roof. The perquisites and comforts of eight years in the White House further insulated them from the harsher economic realities of life. Bill and Hillary have every indication of believing that this form of life was their due; they were doing good things; therefore, they ought to be treated well -- very well. 

And people still wonder why so many in the nation backed Trump.

Although the book was published by Regnery, a conservative press, Barbara Olson was no far-right crusader. She had worked in the justice department as a prosecutor. Her husband Ted was solicitor general under George W. Bush and was a lawyer for him in Bush v. Gore, but has since represented clients on behalf of anchor babies and gay marriage. How Barbara Olson felt about these issues I don't know. She had previously written a book called Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, so she seemed to have taken a particular disgust with the Clintons and their tactics. 

I would love to have heard Barbara Olson's commentary during the 2016 election, but that was not to be.

Maybe the worst thing Bill Clinton did as president was nothing -- about a certain Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets only a brief mention in this book:

In the mind of Bill Clinton, political considerations outweigh even life-and-death matters of great concern to his own law-enforcement officials, not to mention the nation. As many in his own cabinet had repeatedly stated, terrorism, both foreign and domestic, was the nation's primary security anxiety. Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden.

Barbara Olson perished on September 11, 2001, when the airplane to Los Angeles in which she was a passenger, American Airlines Flight 77, was forced to crash into the Pentagon by psychopathic terrorist flunkies working for Osama Bin Laden.