[In the following review, Seitz offers a negative assessment of No One Left to Lie To.]

If the journalistic equivalent of the Richter Scale were applied to political commentary, it would probably start with ‘analysis’ and ‘opinion’ at the bottom of the scale, then graduate through degrees of ‘criticism’ and ‘polemic,’ and finally peak in the red zone of ‘diatribe’ and ‘convulsive rant.’ Christopher Hitchens's venomous little tract on President Clinton fairly quivers at the top end of the scale. [No One Left to Lie To] resembles one of those manic 18th-century pamphlets that used to circulate in the muddy streets of London and New York, and it should have been entitled ‘No One Left to Lie To: Being an Alarming Dissertation on the Venalitie, Hypocrisie, Perfidie, Larcenie and Other Diseases of the President of the United States and How He hath Caused the Ruination of Women-folk and the Nation and Got Away with It.’

As an entertaining and engaging journalist, Hitchens cheerfully admits that his bite-size tome amounts to little more than ‘an attack on a crooked president and a corrupt and reactionary administration.’ For him, everything in the land of Clintonia is a vast no-wing conspiracy which can be understood only by appreciating that the essence of American politics ‘consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.’ And with the Great Manipulator in the Oval Office, says Hitchens, this cynical approach to governance has been articulated in the precise strategy of ‘triangulation.’

Triangulation means a White House which offers tantalising, saccharine, politically correct promises to the Left but delivers placating, devious, deconstructionist deeds to the Right. So ‘health reform’ is launched with triumphant hallelujahs and then abandoned at the behest of the big insurance companies. The feel-your-pain compassion of ‘welfare reform’ consists merely of gutting the New Deal. And after suitable invocations of perpetual peace, the ABM Treaty is abandoned in favour of a revivified Star Wars. In other words, the left hand is clenched in a fist of militant progressivism while the right hand flashes the middle finger of reaction.

In the Clinton coterie, Hitchens goes on, the practice of triangulation has become so cynical that even Machiavelli would feel a trifle awkward in the Oval Office. When Governor Clinton was campaigning for the White House in 1992 as a sweetheart New Democrat, he ostentatiously broke off his political rounds in order to return to Arkansas to oversee the execution of the mentally retarded convict Ricky Ray Rector. And in the 1996 election the Clinton White House hoarded its mountains of campaign cash, because if the money were shared with Democratic congressional candidates, the Democrats might have won a majority in the House of Representatives, and that would have meant Dick Gephart as Speaker of the House, and that would have undermined Clinton's position as Democrat supremo.

Nor is foreign policy immune from triangulation. External relations are, in fact, subservient to it. Got a little problem with the grand jury? Fire off a missile or two at Afghanistan and Sudan. Got a little problem with an impeachment vote? Press that launch button again.

The villain of the piece, according to Hitchens, is the erstwhile Clinton consultant and sexual roustabout Dick Morris, a view more maturely corroborated in George Stephanopoulos's recent book (Stephanopoulos says that for a period of eight months leading up to the 1996 election Morris was virtually President of the United States). Morris is an Iago without an Othello, and as a former adviser to Senator Jesse Helms is himself a living example of triangulation. With typical delicacy, Hitchens calls him ‘Clinton's pimp,’ and attributes to Morris the guiding principle of the Clinton political philosophy: how do the polls look?

Mercifully, Hitchens expends little of his unbounded energy on the Monica Lewinsky affair. His last chapter is largely devoted to his J'accuse 15 minutes of fame earlier this year when he swore in an affidavit that his former friend and presidential adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, had indeed lied when he claimed to prosecutors that the White House had never tried to trash Miss Lewinsky. On the broader constitutional matter of impeachment, Hitchens says that the presidential dissembling and deceit were wholly predictable once you understand the context. In fact, he asserts that the most convincing of the three articles of impeachment voted by the House of Representatives was not ‘perjury’ or ‘obstruction of justice’ but the charge of ‘abuse of power.’

As a rehash of previous articles in Vanity Fair, this book is a structural jumble, and it almost drowns in its own bile. Regrettably, too, Hitchens undermines the cogency of his arguments by the undisciplined virulence of his attack. You get the feeling that if Clinton brushed his teeth backwards and forwards instead of up and down, Hitchens would see a sinister plot. Behind all this panting and twitching, there is a surely a strong case to be made, but by comparison the Starr Report was the very model of lofty restraint.

Hitchens's real gripe is with the traditional Left and how easily and moronically it has been duped by President Clinton's legerdemain. The Left, he declaims, is a ‘moral and intellectual shambles’ (an observation reflected in the prose), and his own loyalty to radical paranoia shines through in silly pronouncements such as describing the US military as ‘the unelected and unaccountable uniformed para-state’ or asserting that the enlargement of NATO is really designed to expand the market for American arms manufacturers.

Splenetic denunciations rarely add much of value to a debate, and reading Christopher Hitchens is a little like lunching with Hannibal Lecter.